Questioning and exploring with geotagged images using Flickr

The popular photo-sharing site Flickr (owned by Yahoo!) allows you to upload, organize, and map your favorite images.  Flickr allows users to geotag their images and has about 100 million geotagged at the moment.  That collection of photos is a massive database, waiting for you and your students to explore - and question.

The ability to use the map search to find certain images in a geographic area (or to see how  a phenomena varies across geography) is certainly one of the most instructionally relevant parts of this site.

For earth science and physical geography teachers, there are questions and photos, a plenty!

• How does volcano shape vary geographically?  [map]
• What factors might affect damage from earthquakes? [map]
• What can be learned about the structure and composition of rock around the world? [map]

Social studies, history, and anthropology learners have equally intriguing options:

• Does culture and geography effect the shape of our cities? [map]
• What does our clothing say about who we are and where we live? [map]
• Do our monuments say more about our past or our present? [map]

What questions can you ask that can be (at least in part) answered by exploring others' geotagged images?  Share your ideas by commenting to this post.

Keeping it simple: the GeoImgr website

One of my favorite, easy-to-use websites is at http://geoImgr.com.

The site allows you to upload a JPG image up to 5MB in size.  To geotag your image

1. Press "Browse" and find your image.  Double-click it or press the "OK" button to load the image to the server.  If you use a large image, this could take some time as the image actually copies to the server.
2. Drag-and-drop the map and zoom in as needed to get the most accurate location on the map.  Double click to move the marker to your map center.
3. Press the "Tag Photo!" button.
4. Press the "Download Photo!" button to save your image back to your computer.  The image now has the lat-long data written to the header (or EXIF) data of the image.

That's it!  It's a great, simple tool, especially for geotagging single images.  No software to install and no complexities!