Thu

Aug 18
2005

Tim O'Reilly

Tim O'Reilly

SmugMug Maps goes live

I saw a preview at OScon, and was pretty impressed. Smugmug has a great app for geolocating your photostream on Google maps. It's the first photo on map application that I thought was ready for widespread adoption.
 

Just heard from Don McAskill that the site is open to the public. He wrote:

Thanks again for taking a few minutes to give me your input on our maps interface @ OSCON. Early Tuesday morning we "soft-launched" it, and our customers are having a ball. Technically we're not announcing it until Friday, but there's no information embargo or anything. Play with it and tell anyone you'd like.
 

http://maps.smugmug.com/

Highlights include:

- All smugmug RSS/Atom feeds support geo data, so other apps/services/etc can use this anyway they'd like.

- Google Earth KML is a supported format for all feeds, too, so we can toss photos across the surface of the earth from anywhere on smugmug. Very cool.

- Search for photos by address & various different types of smugmug data. We haven't blended smugmug's full-text search with it, yet, but it's coming. Keyword tags, like del.icio.us, do work, as do others.

- Easy-to-map your photos with interactive Google Maps interface. No need to type Latitude & Longitude directly, and can fine-tune locations on Google Maps.

- We have a "timeline" option which takes the time the photo was taken and creates an animation so we can follow your path as you took your photos on, say, a backpacking trip across Europe or something. Just hit "play" on any of the maps, sit back, and enjoy. Perfect for travellers, which is a big market segment for us.

- Basic documentation and commented Javascript code, since we're encouraging other sites to do other things with our feeds or mix them with their own data. We'll continue to enhance and expand the docs to make this easier.


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Comments: 4

  andy williams [08.18.05 01:14 PM]

yeah it's very cool. i've been a google maps fan for a while, google earth, too. smugmug's made it so easy to input the geo data and have it attached to my photos. i like the fact that there's both thin client (maps.smugmug.com) and fat client (google earth, via feed button) available.

can't wait for canon to come out with gps built-in to my dslr, then the lat/long etc will be automatically in the file's exif data. for now, though, adding the geo data is simple - you can put it in directly if you know it, or smugmug has made an easy to use lookup tool - just type in the address and the latitude longitude comes up.

shay stephens, another nyc photographer who collaborated on this gallery with me, does a ton of weddings in nyc - people who find him via google, they come from all over the world - smugmug maps will enable him to make a promo gallery of nyc venues, putting a wedding pic on the actual place on the map... great for prospect visualization. just one of many apps i think for this new feature.

here's my gallery if you'd like to see it

http://www.moonriverphotography.com/gallery/734406

  Chandu Thota [08.22.05 01:04 PM]

Here is a slight variation of my "photo geo tagging" app using Flickr and Virtual Earth:

GeoTagr: http://www.csthota.com/geotagr

  Kord Campbell [08.25.05 09:13 AM]

Um, hello! We've been doing this for like 3 months now. :)



http://www.zoto.com/users/geotags/dist/



We also support the following features:



- RSS/Atom feeds contain GPS data


- GeoURL support for pages displaying photos with GPS info


- Direct input with a Google Maps interface, point zoom and click to select location.


- EXIF support for extracting GPS info from the JPG directly (great for cameras/software that stitch image/location together)


- Click and search around a particular location by user, or all users.



I like SmugMug's timeline feature, and the Smug Smile on all the pinpoints though!

  Eduardo Manchon [10.03.05 08:53 AM]

We just launched a similar project:

http://www.panoramio.com

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