Development Seed Blog

Two Widgets We Used to Show Off Photos on StandAgainstPoverty.org

At the height of the UN Millennium Campaign's Stand Up Speak Out campaign last week, a ton of photos were uploaded to StandAgainstPoverty.org in just one day. So many in fact, that at least one photo from the campaign’s account made it into the photos featured on Flickr under “everyone’s photos.” That’s hard to do and shows the fast rate people were uploading photos through the Flickrup module that Jose built (more on that later in the week).

With so many photos being uploaded and with so many of these photos containing important metadata like the location where the photos were taken, we really wanted to display the photos in an organized way that took advantage of all available data. So we started brainstorming. 

Flickr.com lets you make a Flickr map of your photos, but photos can only be mapped if they've been geotagged using a special machine tag that includes latitude and longitude of where the picture was taken.  This is limiting, and unless you do the geocoding yourself (which can be a little hairy but not too bad), you need a way to geocode the pictures when pulling them back out of Flickr. With such a fast paced campaign like this one, we wanted to use a more straightforward approach. 

That’s when Trippermap came in. Trippermap is a flash widget that gets around the need to tag your photos with latitude and longitude. If there are other location tags on a photo like the name of a country, city, and state or a country and state/province, then Trippermap uses this information to geocode the photo itself and place it on a flash map that you can then embed in your site.  Check out this one from the Stand Up Speak Out campaign:

You can see this widget live if you go to StandAgainstPoverty.org.

Jason Wojciechowski at the United Nations Millennium Campaign actually used the Trippermap.com application last year to map Flickr photos from their campaign and pointed us to it. It worked very well for our purposes and produced some great looking photo maps.

The other neat widget we used to show off the slew of photos coming in from Stand Up Speak Out events taking place around the world was made by http://www.flickr.com/photos/pictobrowser. It’s a very nice looking flash widget that helps you easily setup a custom slideshow based on your photo stream, sets, or tags.

You can see it in action at StandAgainstPoverty.org/photos. If you click the info button there you can enter a Flickr user id and get a slideshow made for your own site in no time at all.

Both of these tools help keep a lot of the load off of the StandAgainstPoverty server since the photos were simply pulled off of Flickr. Another benefit was that a lot of the data isn’t loaded until the user requests it, like the next photos in a slideshow or the popup hover photo on the map, which also helped keep the site running quickly.