Flickr has been on fire recently with the addition of ‘Galleries’. Galleries have been put to great use – apparently 25,000 galleries in the first week – including the Royal Observatory Greenwich’s lovely Astrophotography gallery and, of course, those around the Sydney dust storm,
Now Aaron Straup-Cope, also of Flickr, has released an alpha version of Suggestify. Actually, Aaron says “it is still very much in the alpha-beta-disco-disco-danceball-revolution stage” so be gentle with it.
A bunch of us in the Commons and the cultural sector had been hassling Aaron and others at Flickr about letting people ‘suggest’ geolocations for photographs, but this is much trickier than it first sounds. Aaron has been working on solutions to the problems for ages and Suggestify is an attempt at teasing out the issues though real world testing.
There are obvious implications for the photographs in the Commons on Flickr – no longer does there need to be a to-and-fro between someone who thinks they know where a photograph is, instead they can use Suggestify to propose a location.
There’s a little necessary complexity to setting Suggestify up to work with your account – first you have to authorise Suggestify with your Flickr account, then again to allow Suggestify to write suggestions back to your photos. This is a little fiddly but inevitable given the way it operates outside of the Flickr HQ and uses the API.
Go and give it a go with all the un-geocoded photos in the Powerhouse Museum account – help us locate them! You’ll need to have a Flickr account to do it.
Login to Suggestify, authorise your Flickr account, and start tagging for account name “Powerhouse Museum Collection” (with spaces!).
(You’ll be best off trying this with Firefox – it breaks in Safari 4 and, well, you all know better than to use IE)