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Vacation Photos That Inform Instead of Bore
Posted by
Zonk
on Sun Jun 10, 2007 06:28 PM
from the that-pool-looks-awesome dept.
from the that-pool-looks-awesome dept.
A News.com story discusses the increasing trend towards adding metadata to casually created content. Their discussion centers around vacation photos taken with increasingly sophisticated cameras, and uploaded to ever more feature-rich websites. These photos, taken on a whim by snap-happy tourists, become invaluable for people wanting to follow in their footsteps. "It's the odd juxtapositions of randomly plotted photos that may be the most surprising--and useful--to travelers with more obscure interests. For example, fans of graffiti can search the word, 'graffiti,' and 'New York City' at Flickr.com/map, and pull up photos of freshly painted tags, all plotted with pushpins on a clickable Yahoo map. A search for 'Dumbo Brooklyn graffiti,' for example, finds some 99 photos, including the infamous 'Neck Face' tag, spray-painted on a brick warehouse at Jay and Front Streets in Brooklyn. Try finding that in a guidebook."
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Neck Face (Score:4, Informative)
The Face Neck tag can be found here [flickr.com].
Re:Neck Face (Score:5, Insightful)
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Automated tagging, on the other hand, is coming along nicely. Time and location stamping are pretty obvious (and very helpful), but I think within just a few years the software to automatically, accurately retrieve photos of specific people and places will be common as well. Leaving all your photos in a big directory wit
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There is at least one decent solution to the problem of collaborative image tagging:3 980976635143
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-824646
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Tagging doesn't need to be perfect to be useful. There are infact lots of tourist-photos of grafitti in new-york tagged with "grafitti", so if you're looking for them, it's possible and indeed simple to find them. True enough there's also a million photos *NOT* tagged with "grafitti", but nevertheless with grafitti in the motive or even *as* the motive.
Claiming that manual tagging is useless because it's incomplete and inconsistent is like claiming that Google-search is useless because it is based on page
Privacy (Score:4, Insightful)
Not a terribly good story, but kinda interesting all the same. The author pointed out that with the number of recording devices constantly on the increase, and the impulse people have to 'share' their photos on the web, it would not require a big brother type scenario to see personal privacy become a thing of the past... even if you take hardcore measures to hide.
Oh, and the suggested google search to find 'neck face' returns a lot more than 99 photos.
Regards.
Re:Privacy (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
What was the story? (Score:2)
Similar use of public photos to track the past of someone. Not "vacation" photos, so maybe unrelated or an inspiration for a later story... actually, sounds a lot the same - "she", "otherwise off the map", "recognition software"...
See if you remember the author/story, if it was really "ten" years ago. Maybe it was only 3 or 4 years ago, or maybe it is a "Todd Goldman" moment...
Camera with LCD keyboard (Score:3, Interesting)
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My Treo 700p does something like that. You can put captions on the photo, draw doodles on it, and even record voice notes and attach to the photo. The problem is actually finding the time to do it. I took a lot of photos at Disney
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My Panasonic FZ-5 (which is already what, 2 generations old?) has this feature, you simply turn it on in the menu and then after each shot you can record up to around 5 seconds of comments. The camera stores the comment in a separate mov file with the image thumbnail for video. Rip out the audio with mplayer, run voice rec
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Re:Camera with LCD keyboard (Score:4, Interesting)
I use digital SLR cameras, when I press the shutter, it takes that photo within 2-20 milliseconds. That exact moment you were trying to capture was captured successfully. All point and shoots piss me off as they delay from
I like the portability of a point and shoot. When I'm off riding on the recumbent I hate having a SLR on my neck and would love a nice point an shoot, but I want one that take a photo the exact millisecond I press the shutter (if it's on) I want decent glass lenses that dont give either purple fringing (Like all Olympus digitals) or out of focus at the edge (like all Kodak digitals) or bizzare focus decisions. (Like all current Canon digitals Point and shoots. Earlier canon like the A20 were incredible)
Get rid of movie mode, audio, GPS, Loran, Cellphone, video playback, mp3, or Video games and give me a digital point and shoot camera that does not suck.
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If it's the former, you might want to have a look at the Panasonic FZ- cameras [dpreview.com]. They're still somewhat smaller than most SLRs, and they don't suck. The shutter lag is around 0.009 or 0.07 seconds [dpreview.com], assuming you don't want the camera to perform any fancy auto focus or IS. The larger number includes the time it takes to actually display the image on the LCD. The Lei
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Bootup-time tend to be horrible too. Sometimes you want to take a picture *now* -- not 15 seconds from now when the camera finished booting. (ok, so that is sligthly exxagerating)
Particularily annoying in a small point-and-shoot camera because those are precisely the ones you bring to places where you *don't* want to spend a lot of time and effort taking photos.
My DSLR can take the first photo 0.2 seconds after you flick the thumb-switch for "on", which is essentially instant, you don't manage to put it
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Definitely not. It's 20 msec from shutter depress to actuation.
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rj
Before you get too excited... (Score:5, Informative)
The 'Lonely Planet' book series made all the difference when I first came to Asia...even inside China, 15 ~ years back. I'm sure metadata will be huge, someday. But it follows on the heals of other terrific resources that have already 'been there, done that' and will continue for quite some time I am sure.
I learned how to get the local Chinese police to help move me to my next destination - If you were caught inside the frontier, they were ordered to return you to the last city you visited. The trick was to tell them your next city instead of the last one - they would load you up and happily take you on to your next destination. Courtesy Lonely Planet - try finding that kind of help w/Flcker
Re:Before you get too excited... (Score:5, Interesting)
The thing I remember most from my trip to China is the bodycount. I've never seen so many corpses lying around on the streets anywhere as I did on an early morning busride from Qufu to Jinan. I saw the remains of over 30 (we stopped counting at 30.. there were more) fatal vehicle accidents which ranged from cars and trucks hitting each other, pedestrians, bicyclists, immovable objects, and a donkey in one case. It was explained to me that the drivers in that particular area (province?) feel they conserve gas by driving without their headlights on at night (which I observed). I also noted in this area there generally weren't street lights.
A train ride from Qufu to Xi'an was also noteworthy in that our train apparently struck someone. The train came to a stop with the body right outside the train car behind mine. I watched in amazement as about 6 Chinese officials (I'm calling them officials because they appeared to be wearing uniforms) got off the train and stood around the body kicking/prodding it. They eventually (after about 5 minutes) dragged it onto the middle of the set of train tracks alongside ours, got back on our train and we continued on our (less-merry) way.
A taxi ride to get to a train station in Tsingdao resulted in police action against our taxi driver. While enroute, our taxi driver was waved to the side of the road by what appeared to be a police or military officer. The officer-type walked over to our cab and started arguing with the taxi driver. The driver pointed back at us. The cop-type person reached up and pulled the taxi sign off our driver's roof and started walking away. Our driver got out and went walking after the officer, at which point the officer turned around, drew his firearm (some kind of short-stock ak47 looking machinegun thing) and pointed it at the driver. My friend and I exited the cab and went running for the train station which was in view down the street.
I admit that most of these impressions I was left with were formed through a haze of not being remotely able to speak/parse/understand the Chinese language, but I'm certainly of the impression that actions speak louder than words. I have a slew of pictures and other impressions, but these are definitely the strongest. Its been 10 years since then and I remember the whole of the trip as if it were yesterday. While you would be hard-pressed to convince me to return, I am glad I went.
Parent
Re:Before you get too excited... (Score:4, Informative)
Reminds me of the one visit I paid to Compton, southern Calif, back in....1978? Except I wasn't the least bit glad I went.
That person the train hit was most likely a suicide. Those uniforms were soldiers, assigned to ride the trains in case of trouble. Today, there are regular police, however, looking for baggage thieves, pickpockets, swindlers running cons, etc.
Same as in Japan, except in Japan you are expected to not pull this kind of stunt either during rush hour, or on a busy line so as to cause the least trouble to the fewest commuters. They used to publish monthly listings of the best places to jump onto the tracks... I think in the last 5 years, I've seen less than 1/2 dozen bodies...mostly people from the country crossing busy streets or riding bicycles out in traffic.
Those decade old photos should be up on Google/Picasso, as an example. China has changed in so many ways in just the last ten years...of course, many things have not, but to see the cities grow can be interesting, I think
Parent
Umm, I used it to inform but in a different way... (Score:2)
This year we attempted to trade the timeshare (which used to be cake with RCI) but found that our choices (we wanted to go to Montana) were limited and RCI was being difficult. Because we traded out we weren't able to get back to our usual location in Hilton Head so we settled on nearby Edisto Beach
...or inform **and** bore (Score:4, Insightful)
Facebook is a contributor (Score:2, Insightful)
Been there, done that (Score:5, Interesting)
The only way that metadata can become useful is if there is little commercial interest and the normal urge for mere annoyance is purposefully squelched.
The biggest problem (Score:2)
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Goatse Geomapped, Finally! (Score:5, Funny)
Check it out [flickr.com].
This technology is great!
mod parent funny (Score:2, Informative)
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Re:Cool (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129 [ted.com]
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I would love have my photos in new photo browser like that one.
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http://www.windsorinterfaces.com/photomesa-downlo
(Windows+.Net)
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Re:Cool (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't worry, we won't eat you alive even if you liked Microsoft. It's a damn company.
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Re:Glorifying Vandalism (Score:4, Insightful)
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Oh, yeah, I think I saw that. Was it the one with Bush and Blair anally raping Saddam standing on one foot with jumper cables clipped to his balls? And Bush is holding some WMD behind his back with his right hand, while handing cash to Halliburton with his left, and Halliburton is dancing on the graves of weeping Iraqi mothers? And Bush has piles of dog shit falling out of his mouth? I don't see what was so obscene about it.
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Damn, do I feel pathetic.
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The way the tags are now they are no good in retrieving the article, as they are not specific enough. 'photo, tagging, metadata' would be a better way then.
The way the tags were before they were also no good in retriev