How does Suggestify Work?

This is a short walk-through of how Suggestify works. It will show you how one user suggests a location for another user's photo and how that photo owner approves (or rejects) the suggestion.

(Also, please remember that Suggestify is still in early days and there is still a list of known-knowns.)

Step 1

Choose a Flickr user whose photos you want to suggestion a location for. For example:

Step 2

Once you've selected a user their not-geotagged photos will be loaded in a carousel-style selector beneath a map.

Select the photo you want to suggest a location for by clicking on the thumbnail. A larger verion of the photo, including its title and tags, will load in a sidebar to the right of the map.

Position the marker at the center of the map over the location where you think that photo was taken. You can do this using the panning and zoom controls on the map itself, by entering an address you'd like to have geocoded or by geolocating your current location and using that as a starting point.

Step 3

Well, that's it really.

As you drag the map, Suggestify will try to reverse geocode the marker's current position. (It is not yet possible to correct the reverse geocoding but that will be enabled in future versions.)

You can also suggest whether the photo was taken indoors or outdoors. This data is not exposed anywhere on the Flickr website yet but can be queried using the Flickr API.

Once you're happy with the suggestion, click the OK button and your suggestion will be filed away for the photo owner to review.

Step 4 (maybe)

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:

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.

If a user has enabled email notifications they'll receive a message from the Suggestify robot, like this one:

Date: Tue, 08 Sep 2009 15:20:43 +0000
Subject: You have a new suggestion for one of your photos!
From: roboto.suggestificato@gmail.com
To: you@example.com

Greetings from the Suggestify project!

Flickr user slash_kittens has suggested a location for your photo "Untitled  
Focus #200907152106"!

To approve or reject this suggestion, follow the link below:

http://suggestify.appspot.com/review/VERY_LONG_NUMBER

If you're tired of getting these email messages you can always disable  
email notifications by going to:

http://suggestify.appspot.com/settings/notifications

Cheers,

Both email and comment notifications can be enabled, or disabled, at any time from the settings tab.

Step 5

Finally, this is what a photo owner will see when they review your suggestion.

The details of a suggestion are left to the discretion of the photo owner and may be changed. The hope is that people will share their geotagged photos publicly but there are lots of good reasons why a person may choose to keep that information private.

suggestify is a thing made by aaron straup cope.