How to Geotag with Zooomr
May 14th, 2006 by MarkI love Zooomr. As I’ve said before, I think their interface is far ahead of Flickr’s, despite Flickr’s recent attempts to duplicate various features. My absolute favorite feature of Zooomr’s is geotagging, which lets you tag one of your photos with a geographical location. Instead of just adding the name of a city to a photo’s tags as Flickr users must, Zooomr will let you get much more specific. Take this photo for example; it’s geotagged to my back yard. Curious users can then view everybody’s photos taken nearby. It’s actually not a bad way for a traveller to get an idea of what a neighborhood is like before going.
Here’s a brief tutorial on how to geotag photos if your camera doesn’t have GPS. First, if you don’t have an account yet, go to Zooomr and sign-up. Then login and click on the tab at the top labelled “lightmap”.
howtogeotag1Hosted on Zooomr
After that, a map of the world will pop-up. After you find the location where your photo was taken, zooooooooooom in! I usually switch my view to “satellite”, too.
howtogeotag2Hosted on Zooomr
After zooming in, click on the exact spot where your photo was taken. A bubble will pop-up, asking you which photo you want to geotag with this location. The easiest way to select a photo is to type the name of one of the words you’ve already tagged the photo with. In this example, I’ll type “holiday”, which will bring up a list of all the photos I’ve categorized as holiday photos. After the list of photos appears below, clicking on one will retrieve the photo’s number and put it in the pop-up box. After that, hit enter and the photo is geotagged!
howtogeotag3Hosted on Zooomr
If the photo you want to geotag doesn’t have any words tagged to it, you can also just type in the number of the photo directly. This number will be the same number that appears at the end of the photo’s URL. For example, if I type in the number 39180, it will select the photo I was originally looking at back in the first picture of this tutorial. Obviously, since that was a picture of the moon, it would be a very poor candidate for geotagging.
howtogeotag4Hosted on Zooomr
May 14th, 2006 at 6:16 pm
how do you geo-tag lots of pics to the same location - it annoying as when one pic is on the map, you cant add another to the same location, but you have to pick another point on the map next to it - is there a way around this?
Thanx
May 14th, 2006 at 9:16 pm
Mark-san,
Those kind of on-line tools like Zooomr and Google Maps really impress me. But they disappoint me at the same time because the small town where I live in can not be magnified enough to see its details. I envy you living in a large city !
May 15th, 2006 at 12:24 am
Jim, I’ve only tagged them once at a time. I’ll look into it and update the tutorial if I find the answer, though.
Kanwa-san, have you tried the satellite view? I couldn’t get a detailed enough map for Greenwood Village, but I switched to satellite view and then it was fine.
May 15th, 2006 at 12:58 pm
Mark-san,
I tried the two functions soon after reading your yesterday’s posting. But the satellite view only gave me a blur image of my town in China, which meant that its magnifying power was not enough. I also tried to look at my hometown in Japan only to get the same result. I must admit that I am a countryman both in Japan and China.
By the way, I have found the Chinese version of Google Maps today, which was launched last year. It is termed Google Bendi. I think that there is still room for improvement on this tool. And I suspect that the Chinese government does not seem to be very keen on showing detailed maps and satellite images of all the cities in China.
http://bendi.google.com/clochp
May 25th, 2006 at 12:20 am
WOW! I feel like an idiot. I spent a night adopting the code from Google map API to build my own footsteps, and here it is; a cool website saves you from all the annoying coding adaptation! Thank you for sharing.
May 26th, 2006 at 12:09 pm
[...] Until Zooomr 2 is here, I just wanted to let people who haven’t used LightMap or who might not know what it is know about a really awesome blog entry by Mark, one of Zooomr’s users, on how to use LightMap. Read “How to GeoTag with Zooomr“. [...]
May 28th, 2006 at 12:12 pm
Good tut! BTW, does Flickr have Geo Tag?`
May 28th, 2006 at 1:33 pm
No, Flickr is missing quite a few of Zooomr’s features.
May 28th, 2006 at 4:00 pm
Good deal, I was waiting for Geotagging to be implemented for easy tagging, however I can’t seem to get it to work. I follow the directions of your tutorial, however when I type the tag or picture number it always says it can’t find the picture. Any ideas??
May 28th, 2006 at 4:21 pm
Update: OK now I’m able to use the picture number but still no tags. I think it is probably finding the tags but just not displaying the appropriate pictures as the picture number method doesn’t show the picture either, I just click add and the picture then shows up. Or is this the way it’s supposed to respond??
June 21st, 2006 at 11:16 am
It works!
Thanks for the tutorial
June 22nd, 2006 at 8:37 pm
Thomas Hawk pointed me at this tutorial, thanks a million. I was wandering around trying to figure out how to geotag a picture for Zooomr until I found this.
Cheers,
Tom
June 22nd, 2006 at 9:36 pm
[...] Via Thomas Hawk, I found this handy tutorial on how to geotag your photos for Zooomr. [...]
August 7th, 2006 at 8:44 pm
Is it possible to change a geotag once you have applied it to the photo? ie. if you have by mistake geotagged the photo to the wrong place, can you change it again?
Thanks, Dan
March 22nd, 2007 at 12:35 am
I have the same question as Dan. I have a few pics that I want to change the geotag… any ideas?
Thanks KB
March 22nd, 2007 at 1:07 am
I think the interface is being updated along with the rollout of Zooomr3. It might be best to check the Zooomr blog for updates and post questions there.