Saturday, November 29, 2008
When and Where?
Do you remember digging around in the shoebox of pictures, or flipping through an album, and wondering "When was this taken?" You can't for the life of you remember when you last wore your hair that way, or you got together with those people, but there it is, photographic evidence that it did, in fact, happen.
With digital cameras embedding the time and date into the photos, and with everything being able to read and sort that information, I don't ever do that anymore. Not that I really did... I mean, I don't really care what date that photo was taken, but I often consider where. Enter geotagging. I know this isn't new by any stretch, but it's stepping up in obsession attention. Before you can really get started with any new obsession, you have an introductory period. Take, for example, tags. When I first started using Flickr for my photo sharing, I didn't do much tagging. I didn't get it. I would tag with one or two words sporadically, but without conviction. Thus, my tags weren't very useful, and I couldn't see the value. Over time, as I continued, and tagged photos a little bit more, a pattern began to emerge and I could actually start to use them meaningfully. I could search for photos that I'd tagged with "cat" and pull up a collection of photos of Frisky, but it wasn't complete. That's where my obsessiveness kicked in, and I started sitting down and tagging photos in bulk. Hundreds at a time. Now, I have a good tag base, and all incoming photos get tagged with a minimum set. If there are people in the photo that I know, they get tagged. Common locations in my life get tagged. Pets get tagged. It's actually kind of fun to me. (I know! Nerdy!)
And so with tags under my belt, and fairly useful in my photostream, I've moved into geotagging! This combines my obsessive organizational nature - (It's rare, don't look for this in the real world. My filing cabinet is a mess. But my video game collection is categorized by game system, and alphabetized by title.) - and my love of maps and other forms of virtual representations of the real world. I have caught myself playing with Google Earth or Google Maps for hours at a time, flying from location to location. Sometimes places I've never been but would like to go, but more often looking for details in places I know well. Details that you'd only be able to identify if you've actually been there. I zoom in on a street, and look for a sidewalk table that Kat and I ate at last summer. Or I look for my favorite spot to park near our house. Geotagging lets me look at my personal photos, and tie them to a location on an impersonal map. Yeah, it's dorky. And why look at a map of someplace when you could just go there? I think it's just one way I feel like I'm leaving a mark. Even if it is just on a map.
I'm still working on filling in the bulk - I only have about 300 photos placed on the map, mostly at home and work. But here's my photo map.
With digital cameras embedding the time and date into the photos, and with everything being able to read and sort that information, I don't ever do that anymore. Not that I really did... I mean, I don't really care what date that photo was taken, but I often consider where. Enter geotagging. I know this isn't new by any stretch, but it's stepping up in obsession attention. Before you can really get started with any new obsession, you have an introductory period. Take, for example, tags. When I first started using Flickr for my photo sharing, I didn't do much tagging. I didn't get it. I would tag with one or two words sporadically, but without conviction. Thus, my tags weren't very useful, and I couldn't see the value. Over time, as I continued, and tagged photos a little bit more, a pattern began to emerge and I could actually start to use them meaningfully. I could search for photos that I'd tagged with "cat" and pull up a collection of photos of Frisky, but it wasn't complete. That's where my obsessiveness kicked in, and I started sitting down and tagging photos in bulk. Hundreds at a time. Now, I have a good tag base, and all incoming photos get tagged with a minimum set. If there are people in the photo that I know, they get tagged. Common locations in my life get tagged. Pets get tagged. It's actually kind of fun to me. (I know! Nerdy!)
And so with tags under my belt, and fairly useful in my photostream, I've moved into geotagging! This combines my obsessive organizational nature - (It's rare, don't look for this in the real world. My filing cabinet is a mess. But my video game collection is categorized by game system, and alphabetized by title.) - and my love of maps and other forms of virtual representations of the real world. I have caught myself playing with Google Earth or Google Maps for hours at a time, flying from location to location. Sometimes places I've never been but would like to go, but more often looking for details in places I know well. Details that you'd only be able to identify if you've actually been there. I zoom in on a street, and look for a sidewalk table that Kat and I ate at last summer. Or I look for my favorite spot to park near our house. Geotagging lets me look at my personal photos, and tie them to a location on an impersonal map. Yeah, it's dorky. And why look at a map of someplace when you could just go there? I think it's just one way I feel like I'm leaving a mark. Even if it is just on a map.
I'm still working on filling in the bulk - I only have about 300 photos placed on the map, mostly at home and work. But here's my photo map.
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Warranty: VOID
Alright, I'm working on getting everything imported into blogger from my old blog. It might take a little bit, but for now let's just focus on the present. So, here we are. Hopefully you can find it.
Much going on, as usual. But using blogger, I'll hopefully be able to find all the tools I want to keep updating, maybe even more regularly. Let's see how this goes.
Much going on, as usual. But using blogger, I'll hopefully be able to find all the tools I want to keep updating, maybe even more regularly. Let's see how this goes.
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