Ron Kok and I presented Shotspot yesterday at “Visualizing our World of Data” in Amsterdam. Here is a pic, I’m the white shirt to the left:

How ShotSpot Works to Improve Upon Flickr:

If you find a photo on Flickr the geographic data (from the camera or set manually) will sometimes tell where the photo was taken. But where is the photographer from? You can’t tell. Looking at the Flickr API we realized that we could find the location of the user based on the location of their user account. We could then assume that if a user is taking pictures in a country other than his own that he is traveling.

What we’ve done with Shotspot is allow users of the application to look for trends in travel and make comparisons of photographs throughout the year or at different times of day.

Shotspot is for anyone interested in filtered large amounts of Flickr photos. But more specifically we hope that it will be a useful tool for photographers that want to compare photos and travel trends. Based on the data we hope they can then make a more auspicious decision on when to capturing a particular shot.

The Shotspot project was developed with the help of Ron Kok and Remon van den Bergh (Information Science @ University of Amsterdam) and Bohe Xie (MA Editorial Design @ MaHKU in Utrecht).

More Info

*Anne Helmond covered Shotspot and the event on the University of Amsterdam New Media blog.

*Also from yesterday’s event: check out the brilliant WorldMinder project that improves upon Gapminder – from my friends Marijn de Vries Hoogerwerff, Arthur Stobbelaar and Lisa Ing.

Tags: Information Visualization, InfoVis, ron kok, shotspot