Tom Insam

Place this photo on a map



Until yesterday, Flickr's photo pages had a little bit of text in the bottom right, 'Place this photo on a map'. and taking this photo got me thinking about that. 'A' map. Not 'the' map. I was on the tube at the time of taking that photo, so I have no GPS fix for it. But even if I had one, it wouldn't be meaningful. I want to place that photo on the tube map, because that's where I was, between stations.

So this example isn't terribly good. But there are 'hidden' tube stations, or closed stations. I'd like to put photos of them on the tube map, because that's where they are to Londoners. I'd like to place screenshots of World of Warcraft on a map of Azeroth. Putting them on a real map would be useless, it would bear no relation to other photos taken nearby, and would be missing the point. For Londoners, the Tube is a different place from the surface, and tagging every screenshot I take with the location of my computer seems pointless. But I'd love an in-game 'photos taken near here' feature. (Not that I play WoW any more. Not this month, anyway.)

Kicked off by a conversation in a pub with blech and the flurry of geolocation stuff from aaron about Flickr's new croudsourced geolocation work. Which, alas, changed the language of the link, and undermined my point.