In my discussions about geotagging, one of the questions that always arises is the issue what location should be tagged. If you’re tagging photographs, should you tag the location where you took the shot, or should you tag the location of the subject. For example, if you were standing on an overlook on the Blue Ridge Parkway and take a picture of something in a valley below, your subject might be several miles away, which is a significant difference for geotagging. Most photographers agree that you should tag the location from which you took the shot, and not the location of the subject. You’re tagging a specific view.
Since a photograph is a frozen moment in time, each image can be matched with a discreet location. That gets a bit thorny when talking about tagging audio or video. Thinking back to my recent flight with my cousin where I did some video work, the video lasted for much of the trip. Do I geotag the starting point, the ending point, or somewhere in between? The same question would apply to audio that is recorded while traveling.
Well, the folks at Seero have come up with a pretty cool solution. Their service matches the video with a GPS track, so that you can tag the entire length of the video. According to their website, Seero lets users…
- Broadcast live video and archive it for on-demand playback.
- Track GPS position in real-time and archive a course for playback with video.
- Explore the world and discover video through an innovative geo-navigational interface.
- Geo-tag your video clips to showcase the destinations where they take place.
- Experience location specific factoids and feeds with a video broadcast.
It sounds pretty interesting. The demonstration video I saw showed a clip of the two site creators driving around Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. The video appears on the left, and a Google map interface appears on the right. The map is updated with correct location as the video progresses, tracking the trip along with the video. In addition to the track, placemarks can be added to the video.
I’ve tried added their new “embed” feature below. Because the video/map combination is wider than the formatting used for this web page, it will bleed over onto the menu items on the right. Sorry, but it can’t be helped.
I’ve signed up for an account with them, but I don’t have anything to contribute just yet. I may try a driving tour around Greenville, using one of the Greenville Library guides, or one that I come up with on my own. We’ll see. In the meantime, I may visit some of the other tours that have already been contributed to the site. This looks like it has some very good potential.
[tags]Seero, geotagging, Google Maps, video[/tags]