Create a Real-Time Flickr Google Map

.net magazine has published a great tutorial on how to create a real-time animated Flickr map. The tutorial was written by James Christian and Ben Gannaway the creators of the excellent Net-a-Porter Live Google Map.

The tutorial explains how to create a Google Map that animates in near real-time through images posted on Flickr. The tutorial includes how to work with the Flickr API and how to customise the look of your map.

Alongside the tutorial is a demo map and a link to download the full source code.

Integrate Google Maps and Flickr into a Real-Time App

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Flickr Boundaries on Google Maps

Boundaries

This Google Map of Flickr's crowdsourced boundaries is great fun as it allows you to check your notion of area boundaries with Flickr's crowdsourced definition.

Photo sharing website Flickr suggests a selection of place names when users geotag their pictures. These place names are used by Flickr to compute the shape of geographical areas. These area boundaries are then feedback into Flickr to help suggest those place names to users when they geo-tag their photographs.

Tom Taylor has created a Google Map that users can search to view Flickr's area boundaries anywhere in the world. Tom says that "whilst the shapes of places and neighbour results can be inaccurate, in areas of dense Flickr activity such as urban city centres, the results are often excellent."

As Tom points out on his site geographic identifiers are often very fluid. People often have different ideas about the boundary of areas than that held by local and national government, postal agencies and other parties. Using Boundaries you can compare your ideas of an area to those held by 'the cloud'.

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The Elephant Parade on Google Maps

The Elephant Parade

It's not often I get the chance to post a map showing the location of 250 elephants.

In London, a conservation campaign called Elephant Parade from www.elephantfamily.org, has enlisted 250 artists and celebrities to decorate 250 elephants and then place them all around the city. The aim of the campaign it to help raise awareness of the plight of the Asian elephant.

The murphyzVille blog has gone all big game hunter and has managed to track down the location of all 250 elephants, captured the elephant's digital image and posted the geo-tagged photograph on this Google My Map.

If you want, you can also view the photographs without the map in this Flickr set.

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Flickr Time-Line Google Map

Flickr Time Photolayer

This is an interesting mashup of Google Maps and Flickr using the SIMILE Widgets Timeline component.

The map allows the user to view Flickr images for any location in the world. If you don't like the latest photographs for your location then you can use the time-line above the map to view Flickr photographs uploaded on different dates.

This addition of the time-line means that you can search for photographs for particular locations on specific dates, such as Washington on the day of President Obama's inauguration or Greenwich Park on the day of the London Marathon.

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Historical Photos & Street View Mashup

Then & Now

Then & Now is another entry from the MashupAustralia contest. The map is a mashup of historical photographs from Flickr and Google Maps Street View. In essence the site places historical photographs on Google Maps and shows the same location as it is now via Google's Street View imagery.

Unfortunately there are a lot of false results produced and many of the photographs end up with a 'Sorry, there is no streetview available for this location' message. However, the occasions when it does work, more than make up for the disappointment when it doesn't.

Via: @geoparadigm


I'm a great fan of these historical Google Maps mashups. Here are few of my favourite maps in a similar vein:

Tate Gallery Mapplet

The Tate have used Street View to help explore locations depicted in a special selection of their artworks. The mapplet tries to show the same view as depicted in the paintings. Part of the idea behind the mapplet is to explore how urban and rural environments have changed.

LookBackMaps

LookBackMaps is a collection of historical photographs that can be compared to the same current view as seen on Google Maps Street View.

The photographs are geotagged and displayed on a Google Map. Users of the map can select a date range for the photographs that they wish to view. To view a photograph alongside the current Street View just click on any of the pictures inside the information windows.

To add your own historical photographs to the map you just need to register with LookBackMaps.

Utrecht van Boven - historical photos of Utrecht on a Google Map
Sydney Sidetracks - a map of audio, video and photographic records of Sydney's past
HistoGrafica - historical photographs on Google Maps
Virtual Time Travel - archive film of locations. One of my own old mashups. Some of the videos may now have been removed from YouTube but there are still enough old films here to make it worth a visit.

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Create Your Own Flickr Google Map

MapFlickr

MapFlickr is a new map creation site that lets you create a Google Map to display your Flickr photoset.

Creating a map is very simple. You just select the required Flickr photoset and press create. That is essentially all you have to do. Your map is then created and you can then cut and paste a short piece of code to embed the map in your own website or blog.

MapFlickr also allows you to style the colour of your map border, the photo gallery buttons and the photo border colours. It is also possible to customise the size of your map, the number of photos you wish to display, the size of the photos and the type of map marker.

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New Photo Markers in ACME Mapper

ACME Mapper

Jef Poskanzer's ACME Mapper provides additional mapping layers and functionality to Google Maps that are not currently available in the standard Google Maps interface (as well as some that are):

• Topo and DOQ mapping layers (from TerraServer's Web Services)
• Map scale that automatically adjusts as you zoom out
• A "crosshairs" widget that shows you exactly where you are centered
• Print, Email, 'Link to this page' functions
• A box showing exact coordinates of the center of the map, in your preferred format
• Nearby placenames from where the map is currently centered

Jef has now added Flickr and Panoramio photographs to the map. To view the Flickr and Panoramio photos on the map click on 'options' and select the correct checkboxes.

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Twitter & Flickr Google Map

GeoImpress

GeoImpress let's you search for Flickr photographs and Tweets from any location in the world. This is a very crowded market to enter. There have been more Google Map mashups that use Flickr than any other website, with Twitter mashups catching up fast.

However GeoImpress does indeed impress, thanks to its wonderful design. Flickr photographs are shown below the map in an animated slide panel that can be lowered or raised as you need to use the map. Clicking on a photo thumbnail will open that picture in a lightbox.

Another really nice feature is the precision slidebar that lets the user define how close to the set location they wish to search. So, for example, if you set the location to Times Square you can get the map to display photos and Tweets from Times Square, or widen the search to get results from the outlying district or widen out further to include the whole city or state.

Yep, I'm impressed.

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Google Map of Nearly Everything

iHaochi

iHaochi is a Google Map that let's you explore geotagged content from a large number of websites, including BrightKite, Flickr, Panoramio, Picasa, Upcoming, Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia, and YouTube. The map also features "Local News" and "Local Tweets", showing news from Google News and recent tweets from Twitter.

The map even has a "Local Friends" option that lets you connect with Facebook and then shows you how many Facebook friends you have in each U.S. state. The map loads all this geotagged content dynamically. Therefore if you navigate around in the map the map markers will update automatically.

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Photosynth on Google Maps

Photosynth Map

I'm a big fan of Microsoft's Photosynth. I therefore decided to create this Google Map to highlight some of my favourite Photosynths. The map geotags a number of Photosynths of famous landmarks around the world.

Use the right hand sidebar links to zoom in on a Photosynth and click on the white round map markers to open the Photosynth embedded within the Google Maps' information window.

MyPicsMap

MyPicsMap is a cool application for viewing Flickr photos on a map. You can view photos of a Flickr user by entering their username or just explore the world through location.

If you click the 'explore' button from the opening screen it is then possible to zoom in on any location. When you pan or zoom the map thumbnails of Flickr photographs are loaded on the fly. The map also comes with a search function, so it is possible to search for your favourite locations.

If you click on a thumbnail the photograph opens in a lightbox directly above the map.

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