Nine months ago, we released Indicommons for iPhone® and iPod touch® as a great way to keep up with the Commons wherever you were — allowing you to browse through the various Commons collections or to search within the Commons for something specific. We’re pleased to announce today a major upgrade to the Indicommons app to provide full iPad support. With its 9.7-inch screen, the iPad is a truly superb way to look through the Commons.

With the app, you can not only read the latest blog entries from us here at Indicommons, but you can also directly access the wealth of photos held within the Commons — right from your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch. Whether you just want to casually browse through the various photo sets belonging to each member institution or search for photos across the whole of the Flickr Commons, the Indicommons app makes it easy for you to find whatever you are looking for.

If you have a Flickr account, you can add tags and comments to Commons photos directly from the app, and if you find a photo that you particularly like, you can quickly and easily add it to your favourites on Flickr. New in this version of the app is the ability to build up Flickr Galleries containing your favourite Commons photos, allowing you to share your own view of the best of the Commons.

Indicommons for iPad and iPhone is a free download and is available on the App Store℠ (show in iTunes®). The app requires an iPad, iPhone or iPod touch running OS 3.1.3 or later and an internet connection.

If you have an iPad, iPhone or iPod touch, download the Indicommons app today and give it a whirl! And if you have any feedback on the app, please do let us know what you think, here or in the Flickr Commons group.

We now load Commons collections dynamically through the Flickr API; as a result we now have a number of new collections, and more will be added automatically as they join the Commons. To fit all this in the collections grid now pans from side to side.

CommonsExplorer is “an experimental interactive browser for the Flickr Commons. It provides a “big picture” view of these collections – a rich, single screen interface that reveals structures and patterns and encourages exploration.” Find it on its website or in the App Garden. Mitchell and Sam welcome feedback as well, including in the Flickr Commons group.

Version 1.1 of Indicommons for iPhone and iPod Touch is now available in the Apple App Store, and you want it — because like us, you love maps. The Indicommons app now shows the location of any geotagged Commons photo on a ma — perfect for hunting for that Then & Now location.

If you’re enjoying the app, stop into Flickr App Garden and “fave” it, or let us know what you like about it and what you’d like to see added. (While you’re there, check out more of dopiaza’s apps!)

Here at Indicommons, we’re very pleased to announce the release of Indicommons for iPhone® and iPod touch®. You can now keep up to date with the very latest Commons happenings, no matter where you are.

With the app, you can not only read the latest blog entries from us here at Indicommons, but you can also directly access the wealth of photos held within the Commons – right from your iPhone or iPod touch. Whether you just want to casually browse through the various photo sets belonging to each member institution or search for photos across the whole of the Flickr Commons, the Indicommons app makes it easy for you to find whatever you are looking for.

If you have a Flickr account, you can add tags and comments to Commons photos directly from the app, and if you find a photo that you particularly like, you can quickly and easily add it to your favourites on Flickr.

Indicommons for iPhone and iPod touch is a free download and is available on the App Store℠ (show in iTunes®). The app requires an iPhone or iPod touch running OS 3.0 or later and an internet connection.

If you have an iPhone or iPod touch, download the Indicommons app today and give it a whirl! And if you have any feedback on the app, please do let us know what you think. We already have a whole bunch of ideas for things we’d like to add and are busy planning next version of the app, so if there’s something you’d particularly like to see, do let us know.

Those crafty developers down under at the Powerhouse Museum worked with an Augemented Reality developer to release free applications for the iPhone and Android to display their geotagged images. Seb Chan explains the iPhone application in Augmented reality update – using Powerhouse geocoded photographs on your iPhone 3GS with BuildAR and Layar.

[edited to add:] See also Seb’s article Augmented reality and the Powerhouse images in the Commons (or interesting things clever people do with your data #7215).

For now, it only works if you’re in Australia, but perhaps it will be coming soon if other Commons institutions adopt the technology (hint hint).

Developer Aaron Straup Cope (he works at Flickr) recently released his impressive geotagging-suggestion Flickr application, Suggestify into the wild. Using this, Flickr users can suggest likely geotags for other Flickr users, including the institutions in The Commons. Aaron says,

This is a site to allow you to geotag other people’s photos on Flickr by suggesting a location to the photo’s owner. Likewise, someone else can offer you suggestions of where your un-geotagged photos were taken.

That location information is stored here until the photo’s owner approves (or rejects) the suggestion. If approved, the photo is geotagged on Flickr (using the Flickr API) and the suggestor is credited by adding a special tag to the photo.

The site is still very much in the alpha-beta-disco-disco-danceball-revolution stage. It works but if something sometimes doesn’t work, I’m not surprised. Now that the basic functionality is in place, I’m slowly going through looking for edge cases and gotchas. Please be sure to take a look at the list of known-knowns

So, anyway, I took it for a little spin up to Oregon. When entering a Flickr user or Commons’ institution name, be sure to enter it exactly as their screen name appears on Flickr. Select the photos you’d like to geotag, enter the place name on the map, and click the buttons to go go go!

Selecting the Flickr user or Commons institution

Click buttons!

We’d enjoy seeing what you end up geo-tagging in The Commons. And, yo, Commons’ institutions – why not sign-up for the service and see what users end up suggesting for your digital photographic collection?

Visit Aaron’s blog for a more in-depth look.

Google sky experiment by Jim O'Donnell

Google Sky mashup

Dr. Jim O’Donnell, Senior Web Developer at the National Maritime Museum, is cooking up new ideas for using Flickr photos with Google Earth and Sky. We’ve reported before on the Greenwich Observatory’s Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition and its related Flickr group, but did you know you could browse the photos using Jim’s Google Sky mashup? Jim explains how he built this application on his blog post, Mapping the sky with YQL and astrometry.net. He has a related post here, Building a KML feed with YQL and coldfusion.

Using Google Earth and photo overlay

He’s also got more great ideas about geotagged photos from the Commons. Directing us to Frank Taylor’s article on Advanced Photo Placement in Google, Jim has started building KML files that you can use in Google Earth to view geotagged Commons photos. He also suggests that it works with the Google Earth plugin, which can be embedded in a web page, using this tutorial.

Here are some sample photo overlay files you can use with Google Earth that Jim created of the National Maritime Museum’s images:

• Franklin Pierce Bay
• Cape Prescott
• River Thames in 1890

And the Commons does have geotagged images! Don’t forget to use the Flickr Commons geotagged feed to see what’s newly uploaded that you can use with Google Earth. And let us know if you make any Flickr Commons–Google Earth photo overlays or mashups.

The Brooklyn Museum’s API is inspired by Flickr’s, and structured very similarly to it as well. This has allowed Indicommons chief of development David Wilkinson to build Brooklyn Browser, a simple but effective tool for searching and browsing the museum’s collection inside an Adobe Flash–based interface. The advantage here is simplicity and speed. After running a basic keyword or name search, the results can be clicked on and expanded without having to load up additional pages, making it much easier and faster to browse through images in the collection.

This tool may be a work in progress, and is limited to 20 results per search, but it demonstrates how adopting elements of the Commons can benefit internal collections. Open APIs allow services and collections to become interconnected, the experience of outside developers to be engaged, and new tools and spaces to be fashioned to benefit the community at large.

Usually these “recommendations” posses a similar quality, despite being from a variety of Commons institutions. So not only does this script help you stumble across many excellent photos you wouldn’t otherwise find, but it also tends to help identify threads that run across The Commons.

For example, Recommendations on a “cute” photo tend to identify other “cute” photos in the collections of other institutions. It is great to see these threads emerge while browsing around, getting lost in The Commons. The associations might be less discrete than those created by tags, but they are no less interesting.

Install Flickr Commons Recommendations