Google Earth adds photos but forgets about Zooomr
Published on December 11, 2006 at 12:50 pm by Raoul 
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Tagged with companies, content, google, maps, photo sharing, photos, world, zooomr 
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Updated 10/29/2007: I’ve revised my opinion of Zooomr since I wrote this. See “Taking a break from Zooomr” and “Stick a fork in Zooomr, they’re done” for the details. And there were some very reasons Google chose Panoramio over Zooomr — for example, a non-working API was one of them.
Chikai Ohazama of the Google Earth team announced over the weekend that they’ve added (through their Google Web layers interface) photos and Wikipedia content to various locations around the Earth. The way it works is that you browse around with Google Earth, and as you navigate to a location where photos are available, you are presented with a star icon that you can click on to view photos taken there.
The company that Google Earth decided on was Panoramio, a startup from Spain. Zooomr would have been the logical choice. After all, Zooomr pioneered the use of geotags for photos. When Zooomr launched, that was the raison d’etre, the distinguishing factor that made it cool when compared to other sites. (They’ve got a ton more features now, so I think they’re the best photo sharing site, bar none.) Any other photo site that does geotagging now is openly aping Zooomr. Not only that, but Zooomr used the Google Maps API from the start.
Update: As it turns out, it wasn’t Zooomr who pioneered geotagging, but Rev Dan Catt and his geotagging group, who later joined Flickr and introduced that same capability there, as you can see in the comments below. Kris, Zooomr’s founder, lied to me about it when I asked him, and maintained that he was first.
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I think Panoramio is a better option than zoomr. They have many photos and they have been promoting the use of the kml files in Google Earth form the beginning
Panoramio was the second mash-up with geolocated photos, the first one was Geobloggers that became Flickr Maps after the developer was hired by Yahoo.
Alexa says Zooomr is online since 26-Oct-2005, Panoramio is online since 15-Jul-2005.
Panoramio includes KML feeds for Google Earth, but I can’t find any KML feed at Zooomr.
Fer is right, Panoramio was the second mashup.
However www.geosnapper.com was doing geolocated photos way before anyone else, plus there was the World Wide Media eXchange from Microsoft doing meida/location/time stuff (www.wwmx.org).
The phrase geotagging wasn’t coined at that point. That came (unless anyone wants to put forwards an earlier citation) when I created the Geobloggers mashup putting flickr photos onto Google Maps (*before* they even had an API) and creating a Network Link KML file to load them onto Google Earth (one of the first Network Links btw) and called it geotagging.
Panoramio came quickly on the heals of that, followed by SmugMug and Zoto, both putting photos on Google Maps. I then moved from Geobloggers to work for Flickr closing down Geobloggers and continued to develop putting photos on maps in house. When you look at the timeline Zoomr actually came pretty late to the party, after several other sites had been doing it for.
I don’t think even Kris Tate would claim to have invented it.
Rev, Jason and Fer, I’ve been talking with Kris Tate in order to clarify this, and he states Zooomr was the first “assisted geotagging” site. Quoting from his email: “What that means is that we are a full solution for putting photos on the Web and assisting the user in geotagging a photograph using a robust interface like Google Maps.”
So I was wrong, Kris Tate did even claim to have invented it
25th Jan 2006:
Zoomr adds “assisted geotagging” — Putting photos on the web, assisting geotagging using Google Maps — Check.
http://blog.zooomr.com/2006/01/25/lightmap-and-his-dog-geotag/
17th Aug 2005: (4 month earlier)
SmugMug adds the ability to geotag photos using Google Maps — Putting photos on the web, assisting geotagging using Google Maps — Check.
http://blogs.smugmug.com/release-notes/2005/08/17/phase-2-complete/
From SmugMug (16th Aug 2005) …
“1. While logged in, select Edit Geography from the photo tools menu. (GPS geeks: see bottom of page.)
2. Enter what you have of the address, as in 1380 S Disneyland Drive, Anaheim, CA.
3. See if we could find you. If not, scroll to the right place on the map and click.
That’s all there is to it.”
You can stand by your previous comments, but they are provably wrong. If you want to argue that somehow SmugMugs tagMaps and geotagging tools using Google Maps are not “assisted geotagging” please go right ahead, we’re all following this.
Take it up with Kris, Rev. I called it like I saw it.
I’ll do that
I have already reached 2GB of disk cache size in Google Earth. Can I increase Google Earth Disk cache size to above 2GB, e.g. 3GB or even 10GB?
Jim, try the Google Earth group with that question, they might be able to help.
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