We often use photo-sharing websites like Flickr, Picasa, Panoramio to show our friends our travel photos and interesting places. Many of these websites have the extra feature to geo-tag photos by placing them on a map (signifying the place they were taken). They also give kml feeds, which are files we can open in Google Earth and can actually see our photos.

“LIVE” TOUR USING GOOGLE EARTH

If you have a GPS enabled phone with a camera, you can show your friends photos almost immediately after you have clicked them on Google Earth. For that you will require a GPS-tagging app like GPS Today on your Phone and an account in Shozu linked to your account in Flickr. When you sign up for Shozu and install the app on your phone you can add sites like Flickr (you will have to authorize first) to which you can upload photos just after you have taken them. GPS today tags your photos with your current GPS coordinate. So, your friends just have to subscribe to your photostream kml feed, open with Google Earth and change the refresh in the file properties to a desirable value. This way your friends and family can actually track your adventure “live”.

EXTRA FEATURES YOU COULD IMPLEMENT

There are many other features which we can utilize in Google Earth besides just showing the location of the photograph:

1.     Orientation: We can also add the orientation tags like heading, tilt and roll to our photos specifying the direction in which the photo was taken. This becomes helpful when we have a lot of photos on one particular location and identifying them is a difficult task.

2.    TimeStamp: When people have a lot of photos for a small location it sometimes become untidy or confusing to see all the photos. In Google Earth the Time Slider creates a 4th dimension for viewing the photos. We can view photos over a user specified time interval which can be in seconds and even years. Here is a Yahoo Pipe (used to generate feeds for different websites) which gives the user the same kml feed which the Flickr provides, but adds the extra feature of TimeStamp and removes the limitation of 20 photos which the official Flickr feed has. You just have to give the user’s ID in the second field (e.g. - the ID of the user with the Flickr URL www.flickr.com/photos/31413502@N06/ is ID 31413502@N06) and after running the Pipe, select “Get as kml” option. (Sometimes it may not work the first time, try running the pipe a couple of times to make it work)

The photo below shows two pics taken almost at the same location but marked differently with orientation tag, and also showing a Timeline from the first pic to the second pic.

Do try these exiting features of Google Earth.

Ankit Singh

Subscribe to the comments through RSS Feed