Chris Heathcote over at anti-mega.com has put together a neat little hack between Google maps and Flickr. Photos tagged with gps info are located and previewed over a map or satellite image.
He’s published the perl so I couldn’t resist the temptation to try a page for myself. Here’s the city where I work and (occasionally) play:
rob.annable.co.uk/flickrcity/birmingham.html
I’m an architect first and a geek much later, so there are still plenty of teething problems with it. I haven’t really worked out how to do a proper job yet but I’ve sent Chris a message so I’m hoping he’ll be able to help. It’s a static page at the moment that I’ve manually renamed as I haven’t managed to get it to spit out the file with a suffix that a browser will render. I think it’s supposed to work on the fly rather than with a cron job. I’m also short of a way to distinguish Birmingham in the UK with other Birminghams around the world; some of the links take you off around the planet.
The other teething problem is the rather frustrating discovery that the satellite imagery for the UK’s second city isn’t up to scratch yet. The higher res stuff ends just at the edge of the city centre. Perhaps by the time I’ve worked it out there will have been time for the satellite to make a few more passes…