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So I have a new project

10 November 2013 21:50

Recently I decided to set myself a big photography challenge. The three options which I discussed with a couple of people were:

  • Photograph the front of every pub in the nearby area city-centre.
  • Photograph ever plaque, monument, and statue in the city-centre.
  • Photograph every gravestone and memorial bench in the city centre.

Ultimately I decided pubs would be most fun. Not least because you could do it every year or two, to see what changes occurred.

To make it more useful I decided to not only take the pictures, but to collect, and share, the meta-data too:

  • Lat/Longditude GPS for each pub.
  • Contact details for each pub.
  • etc.

Today I spent an hour walking up Easter road, and down Leith Walk. I shot the outside of about 20 pubs, and then fiddled with the layout and organization of the images.

I'm reasonably happy with the result, but it remains obvious that I'm not a designer.

The data-set use to generate the site - which is perhaps the most interesting/useful part of the whole exercise to other people - is available online too:

All the data, even the images, is stored on github for collaboration purposes. I'm not sure if folk will join in, but I can probably manage a few of the major thoroughfares every weekend indefinitely it will only take a couple of days to get "city-wide coverage", then the rest is gravy.

Tags: edinburgh.io, photography, projects | 9 comments

 

Comments on this entry

icon Steve Kemp at 14:11 on 11 November 2013
http://www.steve.org.uk/

Yes, there are some little niggles. I've cleaned thins up a little, but the navigation is still a pain.

Ideally it should remember where you were last viewing, and return there. That would avoid the jarring disconnect where you restart at the same point each time.

Also I'm having issues with the venue-pages not correctly jumping to the correct spot on the map, but I think I'll get that sorted soon.

Really I need to out, shoot about fifty more pubs, then reassess the GUI.

icon Steven C. at 22:00 on 12 November 2013

I came across this: http://www.geograph.org.uk/

The photos are typically CC-licensed and are then mass imported into Wikimedia Commons.

icon Steven C. at 01:08 on 11 November 2013
http://pyro.eu.org/

Slightly related, I had an idea to tag locations of small, independent local shops/businesses into OpenStreetMap. (Thought of this because publicity material for some upcoming event, "Small Business Saturday", only had a list of them; alas, no map shows where they are, probably as they tend to come and go rather quickly). I guess it wouldn't hurt to also take a photo if I'm there.

icon Greg Grossmeier at 02:23 on 11 November 2013
http://blog.grossmeier.net

Would be great to get those photos and data on Wikimedia Commons (or at least under a Free license, wink wink).

icon Erik Johansson at 08:52 on 11 November 2013
http://switch2osm.org/using-tiles/getting-started-with-leaflet/

Mapping is fun, use OSM basemap instead, you could even have an archive of the map for each year..

A good example is available on Switch2osm: points on map with leaflet

icon Steve Kemp at 09:47 on 11 November 2013
http://www.steve.org.uk/

Thanks for the feedback, in brief:

  • I consider the data public-domain.
  • The images should be licensed, explicitly, and will be. Anything free/open is fine, though I'm not sure folk will want to use the images in the way that they might the data.
  • The OSM map will be used in the future. The leaflet link was very useful, and I should be able to port quickly.

icon Florian at 13:04 on 11 November 2013
http://f5n.org

Looks like a fun project, one more reason to finally visit Edinburgh :)

Small nitpick, it would be awesome to introduce some sort of "ordering" so, you could have a left/right or next/last navigation that follows the coordinates. Like a very basic walkthrough. Because right now it's a bit tedious to look at multiple entries without "open in new tab/window" - least of all because the map zooms back to default size when coming back to the index.

icon Everett Guerny at 22:20 on 13 November 2013
http://writegeek.com/

This is an interesting project. Have you thought about what you'll do about businesses whose name may change over time? (I see you use the pub's name in the URL.)

icon Steve Kemp at 22:49 on 13 November 2013
http://www.steve.org.uk/

Tracking the changes is half the fun.

For example:

 

Created by ephemeris.

© Steve Kemp