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![Flickr Shapetiles is a slippy map of all the shapefiles that were generated from geotagged Flickr photos.
Every geotagged photo on Flickr has up to six Where On Earth (WOE) IDs associated with it. These are unique numeric identifiers that correspond to the hierarchy of places where a photo was taken: the neighbourhood, the town, the county, and so on up to continents.
If all the location data for a given WOE ID were plotted on a map could you generate a mostly accurate shape of that place? Not a perfect representation, perhaps, but something more fine-grained than a bounding box. It turns out you can!
[…]
Or put another way: I’d like to generate tiles where the dots expand and contract as you zoom in and out. I’d like to generate map tiles that give you that same dizzy feeling you get when you look down at a city at night, from an airplane. In some ways I don’t even care about the street level tiles. I do but we’ve spent so long fussing over the relentless details in cartography that we’ve sort of forgotten what things (should) look like at a distance.
Flickr Shapetiles — a thing made by Aaron Straup Cope
This is really amazing - I love it.](http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l5ip8xabFE1qz6rq7o1_500.png)
Flickr Shapetiles is a slippy map of all the shapefiles that were generated from geotagged Flickr photos.
Every geotagged photo on Flickr has up to six Where On Earth (WOE) IDs associated with it. These are unique numeric identifiers that correspond to the hierarchy of places where a photo was taken: the neighbourhood, the town, the county, and so on up to continents.
If all the location data for a given WOE ID were plotted on a map could you generate a mostly accurate shape of that place? Not a perfect representation, perhaps, but something more fine-grained than a bounding box. It turns out you can!
[…]
Or put another way:
I’d like to generate tiles where the dots expand and contract as you zoom in and out. I’d like to generate map tiles that give you that same dizzy feeling you get when you look down at a city at night, from an airplane. In some ways I don’t even care about the street level tiles. I do but we’ve spent so long fussing over the relentless details in cartography that we’ve sort of forgotten what things (should) look like at a distance.
Flickr Shapetiles — a thing made by Aaron Straup Cope
This is really amazing - I love it.
