Travelr - free photo gallery for Flickr

About Travelr

Travelr is a free photo gallery viewer that you can put on your own site. Travelr lets you display your Flickr photos geographically on a world map. It takes the hassle out of supplying geographic coordinates by only requiring them once for each location - not for each photo. Click here to see an example of Travelr in action.

Requirements
Travelr requires version 7 of the Flash player or higher to run, you can get the latest version here.

How to use Travelr

Step 1. Get a Flickr account and upload some photos. You can get a free account on the Flickr website. Already done this? skip to step 2.

Step 2. Add geotags to a few photos. Let's say you've got some photos from France, you'll need to add some tags to ONE of your photos of France - have a look at this example photo with tags - the tags are on the right under the photostream thumbnails.

Here's an explanation of what each tag does:

• geotagged - this tag tells Travelr to show the thumbnail of this photo on the map when Travelr first loads. It lets Travelr (and all other geotag apps) know that this photo has geographic information and can therefore be placed on a map.
  
  
• geo:lon=-3 - this is the longitude of this location (in decimal format).
  
  
• geo:lat=46 - this is the latitude of this location (in decimal format).
  
  
• geotag:France - this sets the name for all photos grouped at this location. Remember to keep the 'geotag:' at the start but you could change this to anything like 'geotag:LA', or 'geotag:myroom'. If the name you're giving this location is two or more words long you'll need to wrap the whole tag in speech marks like: "geotag:Los Angeles" to preserve the spaces.
  
  
• France - this tag should match the 'geotag:' location name you just set. It means that this photo (and any photo you add this tag to) will appear in the group of photos for this location on your Travelr map.

TIP: The easiest way I've found to add geocode information straight into Flickr is this super-handy Localize Bookmarklet - check it out!

Another way to find the longitude and latitude of a location is to use Google Maps directly. Find the location you want on Google Maps and make sure it's in the centre of the map, then click 'Link to this page' at the top right of the map. In your address bar there should now be a long URL that looks something like this: http://maps.google.com/?ll=-28.921631,133.769531&spn=59.939839,85.78125. The two numbers separated by a comma (highlighted in pink here) are the latitude and longitude for your location, you can use these numbers in the tags. The numbers Google gives are probably more exact than you need for Travelr so you can round them to the nearest decimal place if you want.

If your location is a place name it might have a Wikipedia entry with geographic information, for example see this Wikipedia entry for Los Angeles. You can find the co-ordinates at the top right of the entry and also under 'Geographical characteristics' in the right hand side panel.

Step 3. Add location tags to all your other photos. Simply add one tag to all the photos from the same location as the ones you've tagged in the last step. So in our above example we added geotag information to one photo of France (i.e. 'geotag:France') - simply add the 'France' tag to all photos you would like to appear grouped with this location. See this example photo with location tag.

Step 4 . After you have downloaded the Travelr .zip archive, extract it to the folder you will eventually upload to your web server.

Step 5 . Update the 'travelr_config.xml' file. Open it up in any text editor and see the instructions inside on how to modify this file. Note: you must change the Flickr user id in this configuration file to see your own images.

TIP: An easy way of finding out your Flickr user id is by going to idGettr and entering your photostream URL.

Step 6 . Upload the files to your website. Please make sure all 4 files included in the download package are uploaded to the same directory for Travelr to work successfully.

Step 7 . Tell all your friends about your cool new photo gallery!

Download Travelr - it's free!

Travelr_v1.3.zip (75kb)
This an important update that fixes changes made to Flickr's API structure (3 Sept 06).

Comments and suggestions welcome

As this is only the first release of Travelr there's still a lot of room for improvement. I'd love to know how you want your travel photos shown on a map, and what you consider to be the most important features in a photo gallery tool. Please visit Travelr's own Flickr page to leave comments and suggestions. Thanks.

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