A slightly overdue (and longer than it was supposed to be) post, considering this happened a while ago, but I thought I’d mention a few subtle updates to the Places page.
Even before that though we’ve added neighborhood links to the Photo pages, before we just listed the neighborhood …
… now its a link through to the Places page itself, which look rather like this …
Meaning that from a photo that’s been geotagged you’ll be able to get more of a feel for the local area. Obviously this work better in large Cities where the neighborhoods themselves can be as big as towns, while in the towns you’re more likely to find the one or two photographers who count each neighborhood as their stomping ground.
I guess that’s the big addition, but we also tweaked a few other things at the same time, here’s a before and after shot, you’ll probably need to click through to the larger size if you want to see the details.
On the left side of each Places page we’ve moved different elements around, pushing the search further up, the date/time down and scrapping the weather altogether now that we’ve established that it rains in London.
The functional changes over on the right involved moving the title, attribution, Next & Previous buttons off the photo. When we launched Places we didn’t have Videos, and now we do and the old position clashed with the video controls.
The other benefit of the Next/Prev moving to above the photo is that they dont jump around as the photos resized. We also added key controls, now you can just press the forward and back cursor buttons on the keyboard to keep going through photos, power user tip!
The “paging” buttons no longer hover over the top of the thumbnails, as they were …
- Annoying.
- Not always obvious.
On a more technical level, now only geotagged photos appear on the Places page, and where possible the location shown on the map (sometimes with Neighborhoods, due to the nature of the beast, they can be just off the edge of the map).
Big obvious arrow demonstrating the feature :) …
When we first launched the Places page we wanted to make sure that each location had plenty of photos, so we used a combination of geotagging and tags/description to automate the selection of them. Which lead to interesting results such as the city of Reading in England featuring a lot of photos about books (tagged reading, natch). Now that we have over 100 Million geotagged photos we’ve switched to “just” them.
We also factor in the Season a photo was taken in to select the interesting ones, to give us a bit more change in the first photos you see and too keep them relatively, well, seasonal. We’ll probably tweak this again soon to get them to rotate even more often, but still working through that one.
City Colours and Endless Photos
As mentioned above we moved the time down and, partly for whimsy, partly because they’re really useful, used the Dopplr colour to display it and link their pages. Here’s our Los Angeles page and Dopplr’s Los Angeles page, Dopplr decided to use Flickr to select photos for each City they know about, so we thought we borrow their colour in return :)
You can read more about how Dopplr (and therefor us) calculate the colour for a place over on their blog: In rainbows and Darker city colours.
Finally, because I’ve gone on enough already, the old design used to have two rows of thumbnails under the main photo and a total of 72 photos, meaning there were 6 “pages” of thumbnails. When you got to the last page, that was kinda it, you couldn’t go any further.
Instead there’s now just one row, but I bolted on the API, so it keeps trying to load more and more photos as you get close to the end of the current lot. Instead of just 72 photos for Los Angeles there’s now the full (currently) nearly half million 444,594 photos.
Which reminds me, we should probably add a Slideshow that that page :)
And that’s the revised Places page.
[Edit: Oh and I know we’ve just launched Stats (again), but it’s nice to give the dev a couple of days to recover before forcing them to write a changelog about it ;) ]