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Geo-Tagging Inaccuracies

Here’s a little something I noticed while wandering around the maps on flickr… either some people aren’t being terribly exact when they’re geo-tagging their pictures, or some data’s being lost somewhere along the way. There are a bunch of pictures that are obviously in the “wrong place.” This is a cool picture, for example, but it wasn’t taken at EPCOT. And this one‘s even titled Animal Kingdom at Disney, but on the map it shows up in Disney-MGM Studios instead. Some of the things I’m seeing are “errors” of only a mile or two, some are as much as five miles off.

It’s probably not a big deal for most people, but as computers are used more and more for photo-mapping and such, small errors add up.

2 Comments

  1. I’m betting they are just inaccurate placements. It can be difficult, especially when you’ve been traveling to a new place, to remember exactly where you took a picture. For example, I had someone leave a comment about a photo I took of a bridge in Louisville that I had mistaken for another bridge (There are3 in space of a few blocks, I picked out the wrong one when I placed it on the map…). I was wrong about the location of the photo, and I know for a fact that in a handful of other cases I had a general idea of where a photo was taken, and placed it in the vicinity, but not the exact location.

    On the other hand, I just uploaded photos I took from Windsor, of the Detroit skyline, and despite the fact that I placed the photos on the Windsor side of the river on the map, Flickr still identified them as all being taken in Detroit. :)

  2. I guess, though some of them are *way* off… there are pictures of Universal Studios tagged as being taken in Walt Disney World. I think that’s a pretty odd mistake to make, but maybe that’s just me.

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