making maps
Written on February 22, 2009 by eric
This has nothing to do with the house, but it’s what I’ve been up to this weekend.
Since 2006, the Flickr photo hosting service has let people identify where their pictures were taken if they want to, and in that time 13,000 people have provided locations for 675,000 pictures taken in the bay area.
It turns out that using the Flickr API, you can download a big list of where these pictures were taken, and if you plot all the points, what you get is a map of the places that people decided were interesting enough to visit, photograph, identify, and publish on the web.
Popular tourist areas of course stand out, but so do the coastlines, as do the commercial hearts of a lot of neighborhoods. I particularly like that if you zoom in, you can even clearly see the routes that ferries take to and from Alcatraz.
In spite of how rich a data set this is, there are still a lot of nearly empty areas on the map. It will be interesting to see if these fill in over the coming years as cameraphones with built-in GPS receivers become even more common.
Filed in: Uncategorized.
