[OSM-talk] Photobucket

[Tom Carden]

> Tom
> The problem I have with flickr is that urls for linking are not a function
> of the original image name.  For example, I have an image dsc02443.jpg
> which
> can only be accessed at flickr if you know their id for your image (in
> this
> case 130811439_2a3fdb42bd.jpg), using this url:
>
> http://static.flickr.com/52/130811439_2a3fdb42bd.jpg

But you can query them using their API (e.g. for tag search) and get
concise xml back telling you what's where.  Also their RSS isn't /that/
hard to pick apart and get a photo URL from (though it is a bit annoying).

>
> Whereas some of the other services (which seemed to be geared towards
> linking from Craigslist and eBay) have predictable urls which makes it a
> lot
> easier to link *from* OSM to the image.   For example, with photobucket,
> if
> I know the file name I can predict the url will be:
>
> http://i53.photobucket.com/albums/g51/80n80n/DSC02433.jpg
>

Yes, their tools for manually getting at things are better than Flickr's.

> The geo tools that Flickr is developing do sound interesting, but I've
> been
> looking at the problem from the other direction.  Not answering the
> question
> "where was this photo taken" but rather "what does this place that I've
> located on a map, actually look like".  Both are useful things to be able
> to
> do, but the latter seems more interesting from an OSM perspective.
>

Understood, but how do you propose to get things out of Photobucket
according to where you're actually looking?  (I confess I haven't looked
closely at Photobucket any time recently).

I expect Flickr will soon allow queries by bounding box as geobloggers
did, so for a given map view you'll be able to see what things look like. 
Any other geo/photo solution that wants my OSM-related attention will need
to do this too.

Tom.