foolography

Panoramio is a company recently acquired by Google. They have a very easy to use interface and are entirely built around geotagging. They might not have all the fancy features of other popular photo-sharing sites, but using panoramio certainly gets your geotagged images on a map as fast and as easy as possible.

1. go to www.panoramio.com
2. on the top right, under the Panoramio logo, click on “Upload your photos”
3. on the left, click “Sign up”
4. enter your email adress, desired username and password, and answer a captcha request, and you’re signed up
5. select your photos, and upload them.
6. add titles to your photos if you wish, and click “Finish”
   • if you uploaded a photo that was not geotagged yet, you can click “Map this Photo” to manually geotag it on panoramio.
   • if it was already geotagged, there is no need to “Map it”

You can then look at all your photos or each individually, with a map displayed next to the photo, which shows the location at which it was taken. Since panoramio.com is a community, you can see other user’s photos taken close to where you took your shot. All public photos are reviewed by Panoramio and many are selected to be displayed on Google Earth. Google Earth (as well as Google Maps) has a “Panoramio” or “Photo”-layer, which contains the selected Panoramio photos.

Another nifty feature of Panoramio is the “Mini-Panoramio” which you can embed in your Website, like this:

Just paste something like this in your website (also works in your blog, if you use the html editor) and replace latitude, longitude, zoom level and user ID, as well as the size of the Mini-Panoramio, and you’re done.

<iframe style="border: none;" src="http://www.panoramio.com/plugin.php?lt=50.945788&ln=6.978271&z=2&k=2&user=1607450" width="640px" height="400px"></iframe>

Click here for more details, or here for the entire API, where you can do even more fancy stuff with Panoramio on your site.

Note: this howto is not finished, as the Panoramio site was having problems while this was written.