heavydog

The Library of Congress, which is purported to be the biggest library in the world and the research arm of congress, has recently launched a new project in conjunction with Flickr. In order to enhance the quality of their photo library, which is incredibly huge, some 14 million prints at the moment, they’ve decided to create a Flickr page to be the new home of 3000 of the 14million prints.

The idea is that Flickr users will recognise people or places in those photos and add the relevant tags to them. It’s a fantastic idea, but unless Flickr has a special deal with the LOC, then it’s fundamentally flawed. Let me explain…

A photo has attached inside it’s very file something called EXIF data. This data, amongst many other things, including the lens used to the the photo, shutter speed, apeture, ISO, contains all the keywording and meta-description data you could need. If, when you import the photos onto your computer, you add meta data to each of them, everywhere that you use the photograph (be it Flickr, Zooomr or Photobucket) those sites will use that meta data, the EXIF data, to infer things about the image and add them to your upload. That’s how Flickr auto-generates tags and how it knows who uses what cameras.

Wind it back a bit. If you add tags and meta data to an image on Flickr, you’re adding the tags to FLICKR and not to the actual picture. As Thomas Hawk has previously blogged about, Flickr doesn’t add the tag added to it to the meta data of the photo. What I want to know is, how does the LOC get that meta data, added by Joe Public, back into the original file (because, I can guarantee that the Library of Congress stores these images as multi-megabyte files and not the Jpeg you see on Flickr).

Unless they have a special relationship with Flickr, then I don’t see how this project can be anything other than a Flickr based project. This data cannot be taken back into the library unless it is done manually.

Your visit to the Library of Congress to research some photos will be able to be done just as effectively as if you’d never left the comfort of your armchair.

If you’d like to read more, then the LOC blog post is here and Flickrs’ news about it is here.

I love what Flickr do, but not giving you a way to export your tags in a meaningful fashion is a hamstring.

MonkeyMafia

Visit the Flickr pool for more of these images.

I’ve added some flickr stuff to the site, on the bottom, below the stuff in the menu, as I’ve got an account and I figured I’d have a go and see if I was hard enough.

It all works OK, except, the image resizing that the wordpress flickr plugin does is shite and gives the images loads of jaggies.

Check it out though, by clicking here.