By sourcing images and applying the principles of photogrammetry and distributed computing, the results are very impressive. They aren’t going to rival laser scanners just yet, but the animations on the Building Rome in a Day project website are impressive, and show the huge potential of this approach.

Entering the search term Rome on Flickr returns more than two million photographs. This collection represents an increasingly complete photographic record of the city, capturing every popular site, facade, interior, fountain, sculpture, painting, cafe, and so forth. It also offers us an unprecedented opportunity to richly capture, explore and study the three dimensional shape of the city.

This particular project aims to create “sparse point clouds” to give a 3D overview of the layout of a city, and has interesting potential for interacting with and exploring a place virtually. They are running a parallel project investigating dense point clouds which looks promising, but probably won’t see any popular use for a long time due to the massive amount of processing and data storage involved (dense 3D point clouds and meshes are huge datasets).

The University of Washington project is similar to Microsoft’s Photosynth project. But the difference is that with Photosynth, users have to manually create “synths” by uploading photos of a particular place. Photosynth does not allow users to tap into the millions of other images out there, which moves me to my next point.

What about the copyright implications of crowd-sourced photos? Even if just using Creative Commons licensed images, imagine what the “attribution” page would look like if hundreds of thousands of images have been used from potentially tens of thousands of photographers. I’ll be interested to see how they deal with that side of things.

But overall, this is an exciting development. There is huge potential for cultural heritage applications, especially in the areas of survey and interpretation. I will be following this project very closely.

Without further ado, introducing… Archaeopix!

The homepage features a photo of the day, which we hope to update daily. Clicking “Search” on the navigation bar takes you to the tool where you can look for CC licensed images which have been posted to a hand-picked series of groups and accounts on Flickr:

This is what Alun has to say about the search tool:

The clever bit is the search page.

Searching Flickr can be hit ‘n’ miss. Generally if you want to use a photo for a blog or educational handout and you need it quickly, it needs to be licensed under a creative commons licence. You can search on Flickr for cc-licensed photos, but a search for “Rome” will bring up everything with Rome in it. Groups are handy because they’re themed. So you could search the Archaeology group for Rome. The problem then is that you’ll find a lot of ©opyright photos. You really need a group which is all cc-licensed. Chiron is a good example of that. However Chiron’s strength is that it focuses on the classical world, which means you won’t find prehistoric Europe in it, or anything Mayan. This is where Archaeopix search comes in.

Head over to Alun’s Archaeoastronomy blog to read more about Archaeopix.

Link: Archaeopix

He had a camera built to a specification similar to that used by Robert Howlett, Brunel’s photographer who took the famous photo of Brunel standing in front of a backdrop of giant chains from the Great Eastern. He used a lens made just a year after that famous photo was taken, mounted on a box made by a cabinet maker out of mahogany and brass.

White then travelled around the UK taking photos of surviving Brunellian structures, such as Paddington Station and the Tamar Bridge. The resulting photographs are beautiful.

David White has compiled a slideshow with a commentary by him.

His ingenious idea could be applied to so many technologies from the past.

It seems that this idea is slowly taking off. Flickr have just announced “The Commons” project. Flickr’s blog post about this project is entitled “Many hands make light work“, which just about sums it up, really. I urge you to read it.

The Library of Congress in the USA have teamed up with Flickr to put a selection (currently about 3,000 photos from their collection of 14+ million) online. If you have a free Flickr account, you will be able to tag these photos and comment on them. The images are also being geotagged by the LoC staff. The idea of a temporal map view comes to mind…

There are two main aims to The Commons project, starting with the pilot: firstly, to increase exposure to the amazing content currently held in the public collections of civic institutions around the world, and secondly, to facilitate the collection of general knowledge about these collections, with the hope that this information can feed back into the catalogues, making them richer and easier to search.

This could be amazing. I’ll re-quote this snippet from Flickr’s blog:

“..the hope that this information can feed back into the catalogues, making them richer and easier to search.”

This will ultimately benefit not just users of Flickr, but any user of the LoC catalogue. It won’t replace the knowledge of their expert cataloguers, but complement it. This is a great example of how this approach can work both ways to benefit everyone. Read the Library of Congress‘ take on the project.

After all, it’s everyone’s past, isn’t it?

There’s one thing that Flickr doesn’t support natively, and that is the ability to ‘geotag’ photos. In a nutshell, geotagging is just associating spatial data (i.e. a set of coordinates) showing where you took a particular photo (or where the subject is located). You could then see where it was taken on a map, or browse photos via a mapping service such as Google Maps.

A number of determined people have written hacks to get geotagging into Flickr. But these often use a plugin for Firefox called Greasemonkey, and a further set of scripts to build in the functionality into your photo pages. If you’re not technically minded, it’s not easy to do, and I think that most people will be put off by this approach.

If you do use extensions such as GMiF, coordinates are stored in with your tags, so your tag lists will eventually become cluttered with tags such as “geotagged” and “geo:lat=51.519606″ etc. It’s not very elegant, but it does work.

Step in Zooomr.

Zooomr have built geotagging right into the heart of the system, with elegance. Your geotags are nicely hidden away (but still accessible). Viewing where photos were taken, or simply browsing photos by location on a map are all built-in, and very easy to use. Not to mention kind to the eyes.

Zooomr doesn’t yet have the community aspect that Flickr does. Community is what makes Flickr so brilliant, and it is now very well established. I think that startups like Zooomr fill a nice gap at the moment, and help to keep giants like Flickr innovating and on their toes.

Good luck Zooomr!

At the moment, it’s invite only, to try and get some high quality photos on it as a base, but it will be opened up eventually. If you’d like to join, pop over to the group page and put in a request.

The group is limited to 25 images per month, to encourage people to pick the cream of their photos, rather than a habitual place to dump them, which happpens far to often in many other groups.

Of course, Stonehenge has some interesting solar alignments. But as far as I know, winter solstice sunrise isn’t one of them! It’s winter solstice sunset that is interesting. Head over to Alun’s archaeoastronomy site to find out more about solar alignments at Stonehenge.

A picture, as it is said, can say a thousand words. My “Winter Solstice at Stonehenge” set is now up on Flickr.

Technorati Tags: archaeology, wintersolstice, solstice, stoneage, stonehenge, winter solstice