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Welcome to SnapMap
SnapMap is a public, openly licensed database of geographic and orientational information about photos. It also accepts arbitrary tags about photos.
Interested? Let's get started!
What's the big deal?
Having good SnapMap data for a photo means having a digital representation of how to recreate the view captured by the camera that took it. In other words, with good data we can position a virtual camera in a 3D computer interface at the same place as, and in the same orientation as, the camera that took the photo in the real world.
Good SnapMap data means:
- the latitude and longitude of the camera
- the altitude of the camera
- the compass heading of the camera
- the roll and elevation of the camera
- the zoom parameters of the lens
Although SnapMap has no particular accuracy demands, users may choose to tag photos as unusable due to inaccuracies. For more, see accuracy.
More background
Tagging
Tagging is strongly encouraged in SnapMap. Tags have the form of a key and a value. Both strings, keys can be up to 255 characters long, values are unlimited. Several tags are already processed in special ways: see Category:Tag, but you should feel free to create your own tag taxonomies.
SnapMap is not Flickr or Panoramio
SnapMap is not for uploading the photos themselves, but for describing photos held elsewhere. Excellent locations to store photos online are Flickr and Wikipedia, but any website at all can have its photos described by SnapMap data. As long as you can refer to an online photo with a URL, it can be described in SnapMap.
SnapMap is also for offline content
SnapMap can also be used for content – digital and analogue – that is not on the web at all. But there’s no UI for this yet.
Digital
- photo collections on personal hard drives and private computer networks
Analogue
- photos in books
- photos in magazines and newspapers
- collections of photographs, slides and postcards
- family photo albums
