technology matters
First, the sources of people’s images are becoming location aware. If you take an image with the camera in your mobile phone, the phone knows where you are and can tag the image with a location. Not all mobiles do that, but the ability to do so automatically is quickly becoming common. That’s really different than trying to go back and find where Ansel Adams took a particular picture. He didn’t write down longitude and latitude. Probably it wasn’t important to him what valley he was in. Now we think of ‘picture at a place.’ We’ve done a lot of work to put pictures at places, but we’re starting to get pictures that are already at places. That’s a trend. Pictures are going to be inherently geo-coded.
People probably don’t think of Google as a company heavily involved in photography, but actually it is. There is Google Earth and there are various ways you can search for images, including matching existing images. How did you get so deep into this? What was the reason for that? Images are powerful. They are a powerful part of the world’s information and a natural focus for Google and our customers. We have had Google Image Search from early days. Google Earth has been about images from the start because it is a photograph of the Earth, a mosaic of airplane and satellite imagery. We also introduced vertical, oblique, and street-level lateral images into Google Maps. We soon realized that when a person takes a picture of the Eiffel Tower, the right place to find that picture is in Paris on a map. We bought Panoramio – a website of geo-located pictures. We’ve placed those pictures in Google Maps and Earth. Now, when you click on a place, you see the pictures taken there. We started Google Street View, which are images taken robotically from moving cars, bicycles and even push carts for use inside museums. The pictures at Panoramio are also in Street View. We find their orientation by matching the images to Street View photography. In these ways we’ve come to embrace photography to communicate genus loci, the sense of place, so that everyone can know new places with confidence before they travel.
The other development is that many online photographs are already located. For example Google Street View pictures are geo-located very carefully. If we see a Trevi Fountain image we know where it is because we know the orientation of it compared to the path of the Street View vehicle. And we know this from several different pictures of the Street View vehicle. So we know where the Trevi Fountain is very accurately, within millimeters. What that means is that any new picture that has the Trevi Fountain in it can be matched with our pictures of the Trevi Fountain, and we can compute where the photographer must have been, lens focal length, distortions, and so on. That’s interesting because the more of our planet you have encoded, the more likely the next picture somebody takes can be matched. So not only can we show it on a map, have you search for it, or things like that, it also means that the camera can be used as a location device. Thus, a camera could tell you where you were if you were lost and you didn’t have a GPS device. It could take a picture, send it to Google, and we would find the location as, let’s say, 123 Main Street just from the world of images. If you think of the kind of photography someone might do on a vacation, where they walk down a Venetian alley and take a picture, could they find it again? Those few
I find the idea of taking these images and mapping them very interesting because there are literally billions of photographs on the web now, and finding images and matching them to something is really, really hard. I’m intrigued by all these different ideas that Google had to make working with images and having images relate to other images and to our locations useful. Where is this going? I don’t know how much you can disclose but what do you see as the future of Google and images/photography?
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The curator is the artist when they add their judgment to our images.