Hello!

Suggestify a web application that allows 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.

How does it work?

Like this: http://suggestify.appspot.com/example

It's still a bit rough around the edges, isn't it?

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.

A list of currently known-knowns is included below.

Suggestions, pointers and (gentle) cluebats are welcome and encouraged!

How does a person find out about my suggestion?

When someone suggests a location for another person's photo Suggestify tries to post a (Flickr) comment with a handy link back to the suggestion on the suggestor's behalf. Like this:

comment notification screenshot

Photo owners may choose to opt-out of comment notifications entirely even if they continue to allow people to suggest locations for their photos. They may do this because they've enabled another notification mechanism and/or because they'd rather not have broadcast style comments added to their photos. It may make it more difficult for a photo owner to find out about a suggestion but that is a photographer's prerogative.

(It's also possible that the suggestor doesn't have permissions, on the Flickr site itself, to add comments.)

The ability to leave a comment requires that the suggestor grant Suggestify write access to their Flickr account. That's because, in Flickr API terms, write means the ability to modify a photo — adding a comment for example — as that user. If a user (making suggestions) prefers that Suggestify only have a read token for their account then they can still suggest locations comments won't be added and the recipient will need to be notified by other means.

Users may also configure Suggestify to send email notifications when new locations are suggested for their photos.

Both comment and notifications may be configured the settings tab on the site.

Some known-knowns

Would you like to help out?

Suggestify is one person's attempt (over coffee in the mornings) to provide a way for people to suggest locations for other people's photos. Maybe it will do everything that anyone ever wanted but, more likely, it will be remembered as a tiny step towards an answer. Hopefully, it won't be a false step.

Which is to say your contributions are welcome!

The source code that runs the site is available on GitHub:

It's there for people to poke around, submit patches to or even just to download and run your own instance of Suggestify from. If you're not a programmer-type but would like to get in touch, you can send email to: suggestify at aaronland.info.