Saturday, July 24, 2010

Find street art nearby with your smartphone - and GPS dangers

Turn on GPS on your phone
go to
http://0009.org/streetart/
The phone tells the website where you are, then the website shows photos from Flickr that were taken near you. It's not an app, so it works with any phone that has GPS. I know the guy who made this site.

You can't map the photos this way (which is a good thing for the artwork), but it gives a nice sense of your artistic neighborhood.

When you try this, notice that clicking an image enlarges it and clicking it again brings you back to the grid. If you hit the browser's Back control, you'll end up at some other web page you visited instead.

GPS, geolocation, and EXIF 

Speaking of GPS and phones, it's important to set your phone not to geolocate your photos if you share photos online. Otherwise, you might be blowing up your spot and not even know it.

You can set Flickr not to show location info for your photos, but that doesn't mean it isn't still in the photos. Even if your online photo spot doesn't do photomapping, someone can download your photos and maybe get the location info from them, so keep that in mind. You don't want your camera telling the world where your friends houses are either, so the danger's not just about graffiti spots. It's best to strip the EXIF info to be sure.

I use GraphicConverter on Mac OS instead of Photoshop for editing images. It has a nice tool that erases EXIF data (photo metadata that describes all about your camera, its settings, and possibly the location of the photos). I also told my phone camera not to save that info, and I keep my GPS off unless I need it (saves battery life too).

For Windows, Google has more info about Windows EXIF tools.

More info on GPS and photo tagging on Howstuffworks.