Quote:
Originally Posted by dlock
Niall,
firstly thanks for a great product (BigScreen Photos V2 - whoops got title wrong in thread !!). Having shown this to a number of collegues/friends they are now thinking of moving to Media Center (or upgrading to the Vista version).
The one question that comes up time & time again is will BSP work with local (files on network/disk) repositories of photos in addition to Flickr?
I have thousands of local photo's geotagged and labelled that I'd love to navigate and sisplay through this interface.
Rgds, Darren.
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Hi Darren,
Thanks for the feedback.
With regards to supporting local files - I've been toying around with this feature (well had some nice prototypes of it working via Windows Search - which is blindingly fast) - but put that on hold for the time being due to the problems with extracting the Geo Metadata. (which is really the main/core reason why the local picture functionality already present in the 'My Pictures' section of Media Center would be duplicated).
Unfortunately there's no single (or even couple) of agreed/standard techniques for the Geo Tagging (and the most popular ones from cameras/phones are not Windows friendly) - which is why I believe sites like flickr provide a full 'manual' 2 foot interface for map placement (something which would be incredibly difficult/unusable on a 10 foot user interface - not to mention the significant licensing costs to allow something like yahoo/live/google maps).
I'm hoping the geo-tagging standards will settle down in the future (and at least become natively supported by the Windows Metadata system) - which will make something like this a lot more 'doable' (and not break the bank to implement - as there really needs to be some more substantial sales of this product to justify the investment).
However - until then - the best way is to upload the photos to flickr and use their online GeoTagging system (if their site can't directly extract it from your photos)- and then the geobrowsing experience in Big Screen Photos v2 will be made available for this content (and note that your photos would be cached locally once viewed - so you wouldn't have to repeatedly pay for the bandwidth if thats an issue).
There's currently some good 3rd party tools to do the uploading to flickr and some of them can do everything automatically (ie. watch folders for new files and auto upload to your account) - and where possible the flickr system can then kick in and automatically extract the metadata. (if you have it all preloaded into your MetaData - and it's in a format they support)
In the meantime - if you can advise on what geotagging system/method you're using - I can definitely note it down as a one standard to look at in the future.
rgds
Niall