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Sunset and random car interruption, Selsey.

As part of the Walking blog been uploading and geotagging some photos new and old from the walks, and linking them with a nifty map on the blog e.g. the map at the end of this post. Photo albums also appear in the main map as I tag them along with the posts.


A scourge of mobile homes



So I've posted pics from the Bosham > Fishbourne walk, the Bognor to Pagham Harbour walk and Reading to Shiplake along the River Thames - two of those are recent walks, but what I call the 'Mud Trilogy' of walks has put me off until the weather - and the ground - is better. Let's just say all that flooding left a lot of mud :-(


A victim of the floods...


'Hisssss...Wanna buy a shopping trolley? Going cheep...'

All this might seem easy, but isn't, interesting how I prefer and have been using Flickr since July 2005 (my 'new' account is 2009, but my original one is 2005) but their geotagging abilities and API functionality is really weak and limited, even as a paid 'Pro' service. Also I never really forgiven them for taking away a lot of functionality with 'New Flickr' being a bit like New Coke was, not as good as the old one and dumbed down. I mean they even hid the RSS and geofeeds for each set? They are there, and you can call them via the API but it's buried in the sourcecode or some page somewhere...whereas Picasa, although being the dreaded Google, has the links on the album page.

Weird how a free service is better than a paid one...and those Keyhole Markup Language links just *work* - the Flickr KML ones refuse to in anything I chuck it at (KML is like GPX aka GPS file eXchange, it's the track/geoposition format that Google Earth uses, it's what the end format of all those map markers and lines in Google Maps is, a way of placing points or images/links on a map. I use GPX another format for GPS track data to geotag my images, and then use Picasa's KML album feed to position them on the map. I'm sure it's over complicating things, and maybe GPX could do this in one but not found that yet - and anyway I'd rather not host all my image galleries, done that in the past and like running your own mailserver or writing your own CMS/website it's a thankless and mundane maintenance task).

You don't need to know all this stuff to make it work, but remarkable in the age of GPS and location, it's still not that easy - there are quite a few incompatibilities, limits like only having X pictures in a geofeed (thanks for that, Flickr), and of course various closed gardens, like Google (all the maps I use can be switched to OpenSourceMap or others, if needed, and I also have a plugin for OS Maps too, which given their age-old reticence and massive license fees of old (I remember clients being quoted hundreds to use a small tile for a location map, and having to redraw them endlessly) but their functionality/stats are limited - I like the distance and altitude bits). It's a lot easier than when I first envisioned this back in the early 00s, when I wanted to do WAP walks (and indeed owned that URL) and all the location data was sewed up by the mobile giants...


ACK!



I aim to put all the images and walks up on the site - currently have 1 2014 walk to do, and then the rest of 2013. There are quite a lot going back to 2009 for the coastal walks, and 1999 for the River walks - some of those I'm upto twice. Sadly for the pre 2004 pictures they're not all scanned, this was why I pulled out my scanner last year and found it dead, but I'll worry about that when I get to them...I have 10 years of walks to do first! Ultimately I think a book might be good, this is kind of the preparatory for that, I aim at a blog post a week at least. The slowest thing is selecting and editing the pictures...been experimenting with Android app called RawVision that are supposed to rate pictures in a Lightroom 5 compatible format, but they don't seem to work? Being able to flick through and rate/mark pictures on the way back from a walk would be a big help. The writing comes easiest, although I worry about making it sound interesting, and not falling into the usual walking/stat tropes. I'm very much writing for the non-walker, or those who have read the usual...a list of directions in this day and age is not needed or interesting!

February 2022

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