Testing the Tools...

Continued posting on the Urbanista Diaries topic with the Nokia N82.



The basic idea behind this journey is that we constantly log our positions via a Nokia service and S60 application called SportsTracker, which in theory anyway, allows you also to shoot geotagged photos and have them automatically associated to your path when you push it to the web service. For the Urbanista Diaries however they are re-purposing the SportsTracker back-end and pitching this idea of location specific way to share and tell stories.

Early on however there have been some kinks in the wiring it seems. A lot of photos were being dropped by the web service upon upload. To investigate this I did some concrete testing yesterday. I produced a route where I intentionally took photos while the "tracking" features were PAUSED. Thinking this might often be how I'd want to operate if I knew I was entering an area of no GPS coverage such as a big building. The result however is that photos either had no GPS data, or they shared the same GPS data as the last known good waypoint. The app claims to upload them to the service, but when you visit those specific photos never appear. This seems to be a result of it not knowing what to do with photos lacking geo data, or a problem handling photos with non-unique geo data. This has proved very frustrating for Devin on the 1st leg of the journey... who has had many photos taken outside of GPS coverage.

You can explore my recent test route and photos on the SportsTracker pages. My data won't actually appear on the Urbanista Campaign until I begin my journey Feburary 23rd in Vienna, Austria.



On a more Camera Toss centric note. I can see some added value to geo-tagging, especially if you are out there seeking good "found" subjects for camera tosses. I used to be in the practice of documenting my better results by taking a normal, albeit horrible, photo of the subject for reference, for example:

This:


Was taken in front of this:


But with geo-tagging set up to be automatic enough. Such documentation becomes somewhat redundant, provided you are familiar with the area.