Have you ever thought how cool it would be to instantly tag cell phone photos, based on your location? The folks at Yahoo! Research Berkeley have been finding out with ZoneTag, a free mobile phone application they created to do just that.

With ZoneTag, you can snap a camera phone shot and upload it to Flickr in two clicks. More interestingly, the application captures the location information from the your phone and tags the photo with that data (if you choose to share it). For example, if you are snapping photos at your favorite restaurant, ZoneTag will automatically tag each photo with the location of that restaurant. So far, 13,000 public ZoneTag photos have been taken and by browsing the collection you get to see a specific place through “the eyes of the world.”

With PhotoSphere, Yahoo! Research Berkeley’s photo browser page, you can find photos by time, location, zip code, country, photographer, and of course by tag. It’s a great way to add a Flickr feed to a mashup. For example, you might want to accompany your map of lovely San Francisco with photos that were taken there in the past week, citywide or in a specific zip code. These examples and all PhotoSphere tags are available as RSS feeds, with GeoRSS coming soon.

It’s not hard to think of other ways to remix this data: animate a day of photography around the world, or focus on especially photogenic events happening in one region. When you put time and location tagging together, there’s no end to the stories your pictures can tell.

Andrea Moed
Design Research Intern, Yahoo!