A little funny, a little sad: GeoFlickr

I've put a bit of work into my Flickr2KML tool, which has been fun, interesting, and good practice for me to get my hands dirty in code after some time off. And I thought that I was doign something that no one had done before but would be useful to Flickr-philes who wanted to see their photos in Google Earth.

Today I decided that development work had gone far enough and that I should start putting my code into some kind of repository before I a) accidentally made changes that I would need to revert or b) suffered some kind of hard drive failure.

I checked out Codespaces, as a friend of mine is using that for a current fun project, and decided that I might as well go ahead and give their 45-day free trial a run. And when prompted for a project name, I thought about using "GeoFlickr" as a name instead of "Flickr2KML", since I recently realized that my tool could be used for more than just Google Earth integration (i.e. KML-file generation).

Before using a new name, I of course Googled it to make sure that it wasn't taken. Ah, the irony! "Geo Flickr" is an application, made by Ravensoft software! And yes, it brings Flickr photos into Google Earth! Egads!

My first reaction was to feel stupid about the fact that I hadn't discovered that someone had already done what I was working on. But two things made me feel better: 1) A Google search for "flickr google earth" doesn't find Geo Flickr (at least, not in the first 4 pages of results), so it's not that I missed something completely obvious, 2) the app wouldn't start for me (I've e-mailed the creators), 3) I'm not sure if it actually does everything I want anyway.

Incidentally, during this recent searching, I did discover www.trippermap.com, which seems to do a lot of cool stuff with Flickr photos on maps, including bring them into Google Earth. I'm optimistic that it does most or all of what I want it to, and am awaiting the results from its scan of my photos! One problem that I have discovered with trippermap is that it only works with public photos; another missing feature is that it doesn't allow you to look at friends' photos. My Flickr2KML supports both private photos and accessing friends' photos. On the other hand, trippermap is a beautiful website that seems to do a lot of great things!