How to use Travelr
Step 1. Get a Flickr account and upload some photos. You can get a free account on the Flickr website. Already done this? skip to step 2.
Step 2. Add geotags to a few photos. Let’s say you’ve got some photos from France, you’ll need to add some tags to ONE of your photos of France – have a look at this example photo with tags – the tags are on the right under the photostream thumbnails.
Here’s an explanation of what each tag does:
- geotagged – this tag tells Travelr to show the thumbnail of this photo on the map when Travelr first loads. It lets Travelr (and all other geotag apps) know that this photo has geographic information and can therefore be placed on a map.
- geo:lon=-3 – this is the longitude of this location (in decimal format).
- geo:lat=46 – this is the latitude of this location (in decimal format).
- geotag:France – this sets the name for all photos grouped at this location. Remember to keep the ‘geotag:’ at the start but you could change this to anything like ‘geotag:LA’, or ‘geotag:myroom’. If the name you’re giving this location is two or more words long you’ll need to wrap the whole tag in speech marks like: «geotag:Los Angeles» to preserve the spaces.
- France – this tag should match the ‘geotag:’ location name you just set. It means that this photo (and any photo you add this tag to) will appear in the group of photos for this location on your Travelr map.
TIP: The easiest way I’ve found to add geocode information straight into Flickr is this super-handy Localize Bookmarklet – check it out!
Another way to find the longitude and latitude of a location is to use Google Maps directly. Find the location you want on Google Maps and make sure it’s in the centre of the map, then click ‘Link to this page’ at the top right of the map. In your address bar there should now be a long URL that looks something like this: http://maps.google.com/?ll=-28.921631,133.769531&spn=59.939839,85.78125. The two numbers separated by a comma (highlighted in pink here) are the latitude and longitude for your location, you can use these numbers in the tags. The numbers Google gives are probably more exact than you need for Travelr so you can round them to the nearest decimal place if you want.
If your location is a place name it might have a Wikipedia entry with geographic information, for example see this Wikipedia entry for Los Angeles. You can find the co-ordinates at the top right of the entry and also under ‘Geographical characteristics’ in the right hand side panel.
Step 3. Add location tags to all your other photos. Simply add one tag to all the photos from the same location as the ones you’ve tagged in the last step. So in our above example we added geotag information to one photo of France (i.e. ‘geotag:France’) – simply add the ‘France’ tag to all photos you would like to appear grouped with this location. See this example photo with location tag.
Step 4 . After you have downloaded the Travelr .zip archive, extract it to the folder you will eventually upload to your web server.
Step 5 . Update the ‘travelr_config.xml’ file. Open it up in any text editor and see the instructions inside on how to modify this file. Note: you must change the Flickr user id in this configuration file to see your own images.
TIP: An easy way of finding out your Flickr user id is by going to idGettr and entering your photostream URL.
Step 6 . Upload the files to your website. Please make sure all 4 files included in the download package are uploaded to the same directory for Travelr to work successfully.
Step 7 . Tell all your friends about your cool new photo gallery!
Download Travelr – it’s free!
 Travelr_v1.3.zip (75kb)
This an important update that fixes changes made to Flickr’s API structure (3 Sept 06).
Comments and suggestions welcome
As this is only the first release of Travelr there’s still a lot of room for improvement. I’d love to know how you want your travel photos shown on a map, and what you consider to be the most important features in a photo gallery tool. Please visit Travelr’s own Flickr page to leave comments and suggestions. Thanks.
Help me pay for bandwidth  Flickr Leech – because paging sucks
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Search for Match any word Match all words — Sort by — Most Recent Most Interesting
Your API key About FlickrLeech
What’s this thing all about?
I’m glad you asked! A while back I found myself getting addicted to Flickr’s Interestingness feature. I spent more than my fair share of time pawing through page after page of photos. Some I agreed with, some I did not (who is in charge of marking all the cat photos as «interesting», I wonder?).
It only took about a week of daily paging to realize that my analytical mind could come up with a better way (a programmer’s mind is filled with laziness and ways to accommodate that). So I delved into Flickr’s API and came up with this…. Ta Da!! Once I got the Interestingness functionality working, I decided it could also be fun to apply to some of my contacts, so I began to expand the project.
For the critics
I’ve received some feedback on this tool since it was unleashed on March 6th. Some good, some bad, some worrisome. Some people have called it great and innovative. Some people have said it’s really not that creative at all. I think they’re both right. I’m not actually doing all that much with this thing. Much of the credit goes to the Flickr team for creating a crack API. All I’m doing is accessing it with a little AJAX via PHP. Let me just say that I never built this to be a cool Flickr toy, for attention, or to get dugg. I built it as a data mining tool – nothing more. Tell me you love me. Tell me you hate me. I’ll lose no sleep over either. Well, no more than I would normally staying up late to surf through Flickr feeds.
Yeah… so what’s it do?
- This is not an Interestingness only tool. While Interestingness is one function of the Flickr API exploited by this tool, do not assume that searches on a username will pull up their Interesting photos – it pulls up ALL of that user’s photos.
- It pulls PUBLIC photos from Flickr’s streams through calls to the Flickr API. Public photos means that photos that are marked for friends or contacts only will not be shown – even if they’re yours. At some point I may enable tokenized queries through authorization, but I have a day job.
- It will pull all 500 Interestingness images for a given date. Sorry about the Americanized date entry, but… well… I’m American. There simply is no excuse for me.
- All other queries or searches will presently return the first 200 (and only the first 200) images. Originally I had it returning all of the query images, but trying to pull in 300,000 image thumbnails helps neither your computer nor Flickr’s servers. I will be adding more images in a manageable way soon, but for now have patience.
- Usernames are now resolving much better than ever before and I hope to soon have a solution for group names. Photosets are likely to remain cryptic numbers for the forseable future. Sometimes this can be obtained by the URL, sometimes by viewing the page source.
Big ups to David Kellam of idGettr for sharing some code which enables you to paste in the URL of either a user or group photostream and retreive results. I’d also like to send a HUGE thank you to supporters of FlickrLeech:
- D. Alexandrescu
- O. Anderson
- P. Anderson
- P. Applegate
- W. Aris
- M. Arsenault
- M. Barker
- G. Bauwens
- Be Happy Books
- C. Belleau
- S. Birdsell
- C. Bourne
- L. Brand*
- J. Caldwell
- C. Campbell
- T. Careny (2x)
- M. Carol
- P. Chao
- L. Ching
- V. Cormie
- C. Currey
- E. Daley
- D. De Francesco
- W. Dormann
- P. Darbyshire
- S. Denny
- O. Elser
- J. Fassnacht
- R. Freeland
- A. Gardiner
- B. Goldman
- J. Gregory
- V. Grove
- E. Guney
- K. Hedberg
- F. Heidrich
- D. Hobson
- A. Holland
- P. Hollomon
- J. Holmes
- A. Howell
- J. Ikharo
- M. Kamanski
- R. Kellison
- R. Kidd
- R. Koelz
- M. LaFoy
- J.E. Lang (2x)
- S. Lawrence
- G. Leach
- K. Lerman
- J. Linck
- C. Lipponer
- A. Lishness
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- S. Mahoney
- T. Malina
- D. Martin
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- L. McGill
- MDN Press
- D. Miller
- Mode2 Technology Pty Ltd
- U. Mueller
- C. Nelso
- V. Nelson
- D. Nidey
- N. O’Rourke
- C. Pacchiega
- N. Pink
- Pismo Services Group
- I. Pitts
- D. Reitter
- J. Riddell
- P. Rinkes
- J. Rivas
- J. Roach
- W. Rocks
- D. Rosenoff
- H. Ross
- L. Schwartz
- E. Schwarzenbach
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- N. Siemers
- S. Simons
- D. Southard
- Spectrus Services
- M.D. Swartz
- C. Thompson
- H. Thompson
- R. Tolchard
- M. Tomlinson
- C. Vigil (2x)
- B. Wallace
- S. Weeks
- S. Weiler
- C. Westbury
- A. Wilkman
- C. Wittwer
- L. Zamir
I’ve decided, in my infinite wisdom, that any surplus contributions that exceed my monthly hosting costs, will now be used to purchase Pro Accounts for budding Flickr members who have not purchased a Pro account themselves. Of course, this is all rendered by me, but I’m hoping you find my work sufficient enough to deem me worthy of such a role. Think of it as your way and my way of supporting the arts. People with Pro accounts tend to upload more and more often. Thus more work for us all to enjoy.
Other things I’ve wasted my time on:
Colormatch – often seen on sites like Big Empty and such where the background or accent colors match the image displayed. Not sure if they specify the color in their back-end system, but I figured it could be done dynamically. I take an image, shrink it to fit within a 100×100 pixel area and then walk each pixel reading the RGB values. Once I have a list of all these values, I assign the dominant color to the background color of the page.
Having problem with FlickrLeech?
If you are using FireFox and having problems with FlickrLeech, I have the solution for you.
Upgrade Firefox.
Check your FireFox version. If you are using version 1.5, it is an old version and recent security updates I’ve had to implement are now rendering that version unusable. I would have liked to maintain compatibility, but there was no other way to prevent hi-jacking of my code without implementing a method call which that version does not support.
The latest FireFox version is 2.0.0.2. Go try it. You’ll like it. It even has a built in spell checker. Happy Leeching 
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Travelr_v1.3.zip
