Web Tools: Panoramio & Flickr

I was going to write a review of Flickr because I used it recently to post a few snapshots from my cell phone and I thought it was rather cool that I could do that. Just before I got into writing about it, I remembered that I'd also posted some images on Google's Panoramio site and I thought it would be interesting to compare the two.

Flickr lives at http://www.flickr.com/ and my tiny piece of it can be found at http://www.flickr.com/photos/28718989@N06/ It was easy to set up and is also easy to use. You can upload an image file or you can email a picture to it. They have very specific instructions on how to send a photo from your cell phone and I think this is probably the most attractive feature. Of course the resolution and clarity of images from my ancient cell phone are not what I get from my Pentax but for some applications it's fine. It's certainly easier to post a quick picture here than it is to get one on my web site which leads to the question of how web site publishing is going to develop. I suspect that the sort of facility that Flickr provides will become available on all the web site hosting services. It probably isn’t that hard to do and I think this might be popular with people who just want some place to upload images that they can tell friends and family about.

My experience with Panoramio is quite different. I found out about it when I was using Google Earth one day. The main site is here: http://www.panoramio.com/. My photos are here: http://www.panoramio.com/user/1120690. The big feature of Panoramio is not that you can publish your images on the web but that they show up in Google Earth. Mine are from two trips. One trip was up part of Barr Trail on Pikes Peak and the other was a trip around Rocky Mountain National Park. I used my Garmin GPS to record the coordinates for each photo and then used the Panoramio site to upload the images and place them correctly on the map. this takes some practice and you need to understand Latitude and Longitude coordinate formats. Some camera already record GPS information and I can see Panoramio adapting perhaps to the methods Flickr uses for uploading.

One feature of Panoramio that is interesting is that all images are reviewed before being made public. This takes several weeks. There are a lot of rules about what can and can not be posted but mostly the rules keep the images devoid of offensive stuff and anything that is personal. I like Panoramio mostly because I enjoy just surfing around on Google Earth and for some places it allows you to effectively zoom way in and see things very clearly - if only from one person's point of view.