For I am Lord and Master of all Subtlety, Flickr & geo(in)RSS & KML

Posted on August 10, 2007 by Reverend Dan Catt

But no so much in the below image…

Flickr Kml Feed

Earlier this week I sneakily rolled out geo(in)RSS and KML feeds in a few places around the site. For users, groups and tags pages.

Tag page example would be: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/ufo

So what does it all mean? Well…

Latest:

Is the good old fashioned RSS feed.

geoFeed:

This is the good old fashioned RSS feed, but only of the photos that have location information. That may not be totally clear at first glance, but using the example of photos tagged UFO from above. Before, if you wanted to do any geo stuff based on the RSS feed you would keep polling the RSS feed looking for photos with geo information. However not all photos would have geo information and in some cases none of the last 20 photos would be geotagged at all.

Now if you want to do geo stuff based on a subscription to a RSS feed, you can us the geoFeed version and be guaranteed that the photos are geotagged. If you’re pulling from a group or user and there are only 20 geotagged photos spotted around randomly in the last 200 photos or so, you’ll get just those.

Why? You may ask, are you calling it a geoFeed and not geoRSS?

Well, I’d say, that’s a good question. And the answer is probably because it’s actually just a RSS feed that includes geo information, in ‘geoRSS’ format and W3C format. Which is slightly and subtly different from an actual geoRSS feed, and I don’t want to cause any confusion by calling our feed a geoRSS feed.

Even though nobody will really notice, nor does it really make that much difference.

KML:

You’ve sort of, kinda, been able to get KML out of the site for a while now.

But I think this is bringing is out more front and center to the majority of end users, who …

a) don’t want to fuss around with hacking URLs.
b) probably don’t know what KML is.

That aside, I’m happy to have put a KML link directly onto a ‘Yahoo!’ site and not apparently been fired or anything. Obviously I waited for Pipes to do it first ;) to see what happened (more). Anyway, everyone I asked at Yahoo! just said “That’s a great idea” and not, “oooh, you can’t do that”, so there you have it.

Besides KML continues to make its way towards being an open standard thing. Probably more about KML standards stuff over here…

http://highearthorbit.com/ogc-agile-geography-kick-off-discussion-of-kml-3/
http://www.ogleearth.com/2007/08/developing_kml.html

In Flickr’s case the KML we’re throwing out is a Network Link, that’s wraps up the actual KML. Each hour, or when you restart Google Earth, it’ll go and get the latest 20 (sorry no more than 20, the next logical step is KML output direct from the API for things like that) geotagged photos.

i.e. using Google Earth as a giant (geo)RSS reader.
I’m of the thinking that pretty much any site that pumps out geo data that changes over time aught to us the Network Link rather than just dumping the current data as a static KML file.

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

Filed under: flickr, geotags

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17 Responses to “For I am Lord and Master of all Subtlety, Flickr & geo(in)RSS & KML”

  1. James Fee, on August 10th, 2007 at 12:19 pm Said:

    Why not let Flickr Pro users have more than 20 photos? Seems fair to me….

  2. GeoRSS Weblog » Blog Archive » Flickr adds GeoRSS and KML links - front and center, on August 11th, 2007 at 12:28 pm Said:

    [...] Dan Catt recently announced on his blog that Flickr now puts the links to the GeoRSS and KML front and center. [...]

  3. Blog Mann » Flickr adds GeoRSS and KML links - front and center, on August 11th, 2007 at 1:49 pm Said:

    [...] Dan Catt recently announced on his blog that Flickr now puts the links to the GeoRSS and KML front and center. [...]

  4. Gregor J. Rothfuss, on August 13th, 2007 at 12:51 pm Said:

    It will be interesting to see if people understand what KML means. I suppose adding the Google Earth icon like we did on Google Maps is out of the question :)

  5. Mithgol the Webmaster, on August 13th, 2007 at 1:05 pm Said:

    That’s good; however, you’d also implement some kind of location-aware Network Links: that would allow Flickr to compete with Panoramio!..

  6. Overskrifts underskrift » Flickr tilføjer geo-information til billeder vha GeoRSS, on August 15th, 2007 at 3:47 am Said:

    [...] Det ser ud til at den geografiske mark-up udvidelse til RSS, GeoRSS, bliver mere og mere populært og udbredt. Forleden tilføjede Flickr så geo-info til RSS for billeder på Flickr. Det betyder bl.a. at man kan abonnere på Flickr RSS feeds - enten alle de seneste billeder (geotaggede eller ej), eller alle de seneste som er geotaggede. [...]

  7. Roo Reynolds - What’s Next? » Blog Archive » Links for Tuesday 14th August, 2007, on August 15th, 2007 at 4:19 am Said:

    [...] geobloggers » For I am Lord and Master of all Subtlety, Flickr & geo(in)RSS & KML - Nice intro to some new Flickr features. KML support and an RSS feed for geotagged photos. Nifty. [...]

  8. Andrea, on August 15th, 2007 at 5:46 am Said:

    Thank you for your work.
    A question: why am I not able to see properly kml file in google maps? I have used ufo tag and I have made a test with
    http://maps.google.it/maps?q=http:%2F%2Fapi.flickr.com%2Fservices%2Ffeeds%2Fgeo%2F%3Ftags%3Dufo%26lang%3Dit-it%26format%3Dkml_nl&ie=UTF8&ll=89.999999,-37.5&spn=77.438548,360&z=0&om=1

    All coordinates seem to me wrong?

    What’s wrong in my job?

  9. RenaLId :: De retour... voici une petite sélection de liens, on August 21st, 2007 at 9:34 am Said:

    [...] [Flickr] Mise à disposition de flux GeoRSS et KML Flickr met désormais à disposition pour les vues par “Tag”, “Utilisateur” et “Groupe” un flux GeoRSS et KML. [...]

  10. Roo, on August 27th, 2007 at 9:46 am Said:

    This is great. I’d really like to be able to pull the geo feeds for my friends+family and contacts too. Any chance of slipping that in at some point?

  11. Flickr adds GeoRSS ., on October 16th, 2007 at 11:58 am Said:

    [...] Flickr adds GeoRSS Dan Catt announced that Flickr has better support for GeoRSS. From what I gather, you previously had to ask for the GeoRSS info with an additional query parameter, but it’s now included with each photo. But I’m unsure if this is in addition to other geo information available in the feed. Here’s a sample XML fragment from an RSS <item>.<georss:point>22.876807 -109.898128</georss:point> <geo:point> <geo:lat>22.876807</geo:lat> <geo:long>-109.898128</geo:long> </geo:point> Note that the GeoRSS information is redundant and somewhat harder to parse. That’s not a good first impression of GeoRSS. IMHO. http://geobloggers.com/archives/2007/08/10/for-i-am-lord-and-master-of-all-subtlety-flickr-geoinrss-kml/ [...]

  12. Flickr adds GeoRSS | Science and Technology News, on October 23rd, 2007 at 12:59 am Said:

    [...] Dan Catt announced that Flickr has better support for GeoRSS. From what I gather, you previously had to ask for the GeoRSS info with an additional query parameter, but it’s now included with each photo. But I’m unsure if this is in addition to other geo information available in the feed. Here’s a sample XML fragment from an RSS <item>.<georss:point>22.876807 -109.898128</georss:point> <geo:point> <geo:lat>22.876807</geo:lat> <geo:long>-109.898128</geo:long> </geo:point> Note that the GeoRSS information is redundant and somewhat harder to parse. That’s not a good first impression of GeoRSS. IMHO. http://geobloggers.com/archives/2007/08/10/for-i-am-lord-and-master-of-all-subtlety-flickr-geoinrss-kml/ [...]

  13. Flickr adds GeoRSS | my bloger, on October 24th, 2007 at 3:38 am Said:

    [...] Dan Catt announced that Flickr has better support for GeoRSS. From what I gather, you previously had to ask for the GeoRSS info with an additional query parameter, but it’s now included with each photo. But I’m unsure if this is in addition to other geo information available in the feed. Here’s a sample XML fragment from an RSS <item>.<georss:point>22.876807 -109.898128</georss:point> <geo:point> <geo:lat>22.876807</geo:lat> <geo:long>-109.898128</geo:long> </geo:point> Note that the GeoRSS information is redundant and somewhat harder to parse. That’s not a good first impression of GeoRSS. IMHO. http://geobloggers.com/archives/2007/08/10/for-i-am-lord-and-master-of-all-subtlety-flickr-geoinrss-kml/ [...]

  14. Mapping fun with GeoRSS and geo-discovery at bioneural.net, on March 8th, 2008 at 5:18 pm Said:

    [...] Flickr offers what Dan Catt has termed a geoFeed (for reasons unclear). If you look at the feed source (the easiest way is to enter it into the W3C Feed Validator) you can see that there are two namespace declarations in the header (the depreciated W3C Basic Geo and GeoRSS-Simple): [...]

  15. geo points, on May 11th, 2008 at 6:17 pm Said:

    [...] geo feeds for my friends+family and contacts too. Any chance of slipping that in at some point? …http://www.geobloggers.com/archives/2007/08/10/for-i-am-lord-and-master-of-all-subtlety-flickr-geoin…GeoPoint TermineGeoPoint - geo Information Online … Overview &quotAdvanced Navigation&quot The [...]

  16. georss point, on June 11th, 2008 at 9:49 am Said:

    [...] &ltgeo:long&gt-109.898128&lt/geo:long&gt &lt/geo:point&gt Note that the …http://www.geobloggers.com/archives/2007/08/10/for-i-am-lord-and-master-of-all-subtlety-flickr-geoin…GeoRSS GeoRSS :: Geographically Encoded Objects for RSS feedsGeoRSS Blog Feed. Website Feed … It [...]

  17. Flickr Adds More Geo Support to Photo Feeds | Interwebology, on June 29th, 2008 at 6:24 am Said:

    [...] quietly rolled out two great new syndication options; in addition to the normal feed link at the bottom of every page, [...]

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