BlogDale

It had to happen.

You’re proud to be the little one of the gang and for ages you’re allowed to hang out with them. Then some petty academic society comes along with a point of order, that really you’re too small to be in the gang any more.  I sympathise.

Well au revoir Pluto, I guess you’ll not be gracing my screen with your crazy unecliptic orbit any more, not as a planet anyway. You just got relegated to “lump of rock out there in the Kuiper belt”. Strangely, I feel kind of sad and a sense of loss, almost alarmed now that there are only 8 planets in the solar system. No more will “what’s the farthest planet from the sun” be a trick question, never again can I impress my compadres by telling them that the smallest planet in the solar system is only 1500 miles across.
The universe feels a smaller place without you in our system. Bon voyage Pluto.

Recently Julie asked how to geotag her photos. Julie does a lot of travelling and she wants her photos to show where they were taken. I used to use GeoBloggers’ excellent solution but the developer got hired by Yahoo! so things slowed a little when he closed the site. Now the plot thickens and it looks like

Flickr are developing drag ‘n’ drop geotagging, as reported by TechCrunch.Zooomr does it already, not bad for a new kid on the block. I’m just starting to play with Zooomr and it looks good so far.Now, geotagging on Flickr isn’t hard in the first place - just add the tags for the photo as geo:latxx.xxxxxx and geo:lonyy.yyyyyy. Now the photo knows where it was taken. (While you’re at it, you might want to add a tag called “geotagged” so you can easily find it later).Once you’ve added geographical information to your photo as to where you took it, the photo itself becomes a lot more useful as a record of where you’ve been. (Actually, I find it faintly embarrassing for people to know that I travel so little, but if you like travel photos then Julie’s blog is the place to go). It’s adding that geo info that’s the trick. You can use various tools to place your photos on a map by dragging - I use the most excellent GMiF Flickr add-in which has loads of useful features, but there are other tools - and tell it to add the tags to the pic. (Or you can wait for the Yahoo!/Flickr drag ‘n’ drop feature to go live). Or you can use the co-ords from your GPS if you have one.Once you’ve geotagged the pics you can use FlickrFly or GMiF or whatever to get Google Earth to fly to your pic on the globe, which is REALLY cool. AND you can create a photoset to generate a photo-tour (the latest version of Google Earth Plus allows you to upload tracks from your GPS. More of this in a later post).

Trouble is, you might think you need your photos in a Flickr account to be able to geotag them.
But No. Read on…

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