The above video is a reconstruction of the Croatian city of Dubrovnik. Rebecca Boyle writes in Popular Science that computer scientists at the University of Washington’s Graphics and Imaging Laboratory have been using Microsoft’s program Photosynth to compile Flickr images of major landmarks in order to create 3-D digital models:

“The key difference is that Photosynth was aimed at doing a single monument or landmark, which meant that it was scaled to a couple hundred or a thousand photographs, after which it became too slow,” said Sameer Agarwal, an assistant professor at UW who worked on the project. “We can now process truly huge data sets — the big breakthrough here was being able to match the images fast.”

A series of videos on the project Web site lets visitors fly through landmarks like St. Peter’s Basilica, the Colosseum and Venice’s San Marco Square. For much smaller Dubrovnik, you can see the whole city, including mountains in the distance.

Each video includes clusters of small diamond shapes, which represent each photographer and his or her vantage point.

Link

In this Flickr pool titled Looking Into the Past, people hold out old pictures of their homes or neighborhods and overlap them with the current structures as background to create fascinating "then and now" collages.

At first I thought there was no way it was real, just some dandy Photoshopping. The closer I got though, I think they’re legit, although a few are suspect. They are from different people, and looks like they all congregate on Flickr to share. Pretty rad. I’m so happy I don’t have a stack of old photos from my neighborhood. I might not get anything done the next few days. “Why is that guy standing in the middle of the street taking pictures of his hand?”

Link – via google

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by mrsmojorisin.

With Multicolr Search Lab by Idée Labs, you can browse through 10 million of Flickr’s most interesting Creative Commons images according to colors (in this case, a set of up to 10 colors). It’s quite speedy and neat!

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by McJohnny.

(image credit: Flickr user xetark)

Did you know that the movie Iron Man used a Creative Commons-licensed photo from Flickr? Here’s the story of how Jeremy Keith’s photo of his buddy Andy Budd in NASA’s Vehicle Assembly Building in Cape Canaveral ended up in the movie:

“Wait a minute”, I said. “What is this for?”

“It’s for a movie that’s currently in production called Iron Man, starring Robert Downey Jnr.”

Holy crap! One of my photos was going to be in Iron Man? That certainly put a new spin on things.

“So I guess you want to use the picture because it’s inside NASA’s Vehicle Assembly Building?” I asked.

“No. We just thought it was a picture of some warehouse or something.”

Read the whole story here: Link – via Flickr Blog

In many ways the Places project is a big thank you to all the wonderful photographers who have taken the time to put their photos on the map. With nearly 50 million geotagged photos – around 35 million of which are public – it was about build something to better show them off.

Link – via Flickr Blog

Yesterday the 2 billionth photo was uploaded to the Flickr photo sharing web site.

Yes, this is the 2 billionth photo on flickr. It was taken in front of Market City in Chinatown Haymarket in Sydney.

Link – via kottke.org