You can now use Google Street View to help set up the pose for a photo.

The technique is to set up the view as well as you can in Street View, then copy the URL obtained with the Link button into the value of a new ‘view’ tag. Attaching the tag causes latitude, longitude, heading, elevation and zoom to be populated for the photo.

This is great if it's a good match. It’s still very useful if you can only position the virtual Street View camera fairly close to the intended view. Manual overrides can then get the photo spot on.

Only the cbll and cbp arguments are used.

Example:

view=http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=buckingham+palace&sll=51.849353,-0.823975&sspn=3.725968,9.18457&ie=UTF8&hq=Buckingham+Palace&hnear=Buckingham+Palace,+Westminster,+London,+United+Kingdom&ll=51.50163,-0.14014&spn=0,0.008969&t=h&z=17&layer=c&cbll=51.501541,-0.140197&panoid=aPgdbbqhtGSoKyex8lSE6Q&cbp=12,258.55,,1,-0.76


More info:
http://www.snapmap.org/wiki/View_(tag)#Views_from_Google_Street_View

Thanks to the OpenData release by Ordnance Survey, you can now use UK postcodes to tag photos.

When you add a UK postcode to a photo that doesn’t already have a location tag, its grid reference is looked up in the Code-Point Open database (1,696,088 postcodes). SnapMap converts this to a latlong, which gets into the SnapMap image cache. Format postcodes correctly — capitalized, one space between the outward and inward components.

http://www.snapmap.org/wiki/Postal_code_uk_(tag)

Much better performance scrolling the map on the main page. Now we can leave pagesize at 10,000 without it feeling too slow.

I prefer Prototype’s handling of Ajax and two-handled sliders... so goodbye JQuery.

Spoke on SnapMap at WhereCamp EU, Kings Cross. Chopped out the bits about the police and urban photography. Less material than previous presentation, but more coherent.

http://gmdlondon.ning.com/events/wherecampeu-1

Talked for 23 minutes* about SnapMap at #geomob — this time hosted at City University.

http://gmdlondon.ning.com/events/geomob-january

* oops, slot was 10 mins, sorry Chris

Much better speed now, and sorts properly depending how many words matched.

Now you can add shots from Google Picasa’s web albums easily, bringing the number of scrapers to 8. Just use the normal URL of a shot, for example:

http://picasaweb.google.fr/etienne.ardon/AHAuMans#5199541760213644866

On the main page, editing the date to two valid years now results in an immediate update of the markers.

The blue Geograph markers are now much more useful, having thumbnails in the popup window. (Thanks, Barry.)

We now have a paging interface working. Whenever the map shows more than 60 results, use the UI beneath the map to flip between pages. This is extremely useful, of course, over dense areas like central London, or anywhere in the UK when zoomed out and including Geograph images.

The Geograph data is now working well in the SnapMap UI.

Initial import of the Geograph MySQL dumps went well. A ‘geograph’ checkbox has been added to the main map UI. However, it’s pretty slow and dangerous when you’re zoomed out!

The Geograph layer on SnapMap comprises 1,352,444 photos, that being the number with their view_direction set (even an approximate one such as “NE”).

Ensuring we compress the XML from the API gives much faster interaction on the map. Properly tagging XML as text/xml is all it takes on many web hosts (use .htaccess to control it otherwise).

In PHP: header('Content-type: text/xml; charset="utf-8"');

There’s a new tab in the maps on the main page and the photo page, showing the default rendering from OpenStreetMap. It’s often handy when Google Maps are inadequate for an area, such as those with few roads or advertisers.

̄At 08:15 a.m. on Wednesday, November 18, 2009, SnapMap invitations went out to the first 4 SnapMap beta testers.

This is still a private beta. Applicants for the beta program are invited to email Laurence at lorp@lorp.org.