When Flickr first appeared on the Internet, it was simply a handy tool to store and view photos. In the capable hands of visualization designers, Flickr has become a nexus of information about how people see the world.
Features such as tagging, groups, friend networks, and timestamps enrich each image with social and temporal context. Here are five visualizations that use Flickr’s meta information to highlight the unseen patterns behind all of those beautiful pictures.
1. Tagged Color
If an image is tagged “summer,” what colors do you expect? What images come to mind with the word “magenta?” What colors are people compelled to photograph? Christian Giordano’s Tagged Color visualization explores these questions and more. By mapping the user-supplied color field data and the most popular correlating tags, this visualization shows fascinating trends in the obsession with color.
As you’d expect, “winter” retrieves a palette of blues, grays, and ebony; friendly purple correlates well with other colors; green’s the most-tagged color; and lonely cyan is always reported correctly, but doesn’t correlate well to any particular photo subject. Even in this age of RGB, the sky is blue on Flickr.
2. The Tag Galaxy
Like Tagged Color, Tag Galaxy uses a visualization to show relationships between tags. Here, the user picks any word to be the center of the universe. That word becomes a sun in its own solar system; Flickr’s favorite associated tags become planets.
For example, when Apple is the sun, its system includes a small, close planet labeled “Fruit” that is highly correlated with “Apple.” It also has a larger, more distant planet labeled “Macbook,” illustrating a larger set of photos with less correlation.
3. Flickr Graph
What about Flickr friends? Marcos Wescamp’s attraction-repulsion visualization of a user’s friends is prettier than reading a list and more insightful, too. This visualization highlights cliques within a user’s friend list, and features skeleton-key buddies who seem to follow the user through multiple circles of associations.
The most interconnected and open users don’t have circles of friends so much as a large interconnected mass of companions, sharing photos and friendships.
4. Visualizing the Processing Flickr Group
“Processing” is a programming language for creators of visualizations. Andreas Koberle used this language to create a visualization of the relationships between all the members of the Processing group on Flickr.
The image is literally a circle of friends, and the friendliest of the bunch form very obvious fountains of connections. The image is appropriately titled “everyone knows everyone from Flickr.”
5. The Geotagger’s World Atlas
When you’re in Paris, where do you go in a day? How much ground do you cover in a week? How many other tourists have traveled your same path?
Eric Fisher’s Geotagger’s World Atlas shows an eerie temporal ghost city, as told through the timestamps and geotags of tourist’s photos. Paths of travelers, extrapolated from their photos, map out popular city destinations; locals-only neighborhoods fade into white, unrecorded.
Thanks to these and other visualizations, Flickr has become more than an Internet photo album; it stores a snapshot of the relationships and perceptions that shape human life.
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Greetings.
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thanks for sharing .