It is true, I do know about metadata, and the type of information that one can retrieve from a single digital image, but I did not really think much on what I can do with that kind of information.
Personally, I've taken about 50,000 photos over the last 6-7 years that I have been as a photographer. Often, I've classified them into events, and in chronological order. This would give me the ability to see all the photos at once, and to search through them easily.
On Flickr itself, I would get pretty annoyed when someone would just tag 'Singapore', and now I see how many photos people have taken there. It just appeared to me that some people are too lazy to even tag a proper location. I wouldn't mind if tourists or foreigners did not know the place well, but I've seen many Singaporeans who do that too, and that annoys me a bit.
But let's not go off-topic.
We were given a task to create a visualization based on the information that one can retrieve on the camera.
For the purpose of this exercise, we decided to look at time of the photo taken, and time of the photo uploaded. This is our visualization, as shown below:
On one end, we would be able to see the time that the photo was taken, and on the other end, would be time that the user had uploaded the image.
We were expecting to see a visualization as such, but when I think about it now, perhaps it is better if the axis were vertical instead of horizontal, just maybe it would be clearer to see the visualization.
From this, we are able to see the time of the day where people take the most number of photos, and also the time where one uploads the most amount of photos.
Of course, we would typically expect the mobile phone photographer to upload the image almost instantly, probably just throw a filter on and upload.
However, many in the photography community wouldn't really do that, even on their mobile phone. Instead, we would take the photograph, and post-process it (on an app such as Snapseed or PS) before we upload it. This could be done in a couple of minutes, to maybe an hour on photoshop (if on the computer).
We could further tell who are the ones who upload the image immediately, and if people have liked such photos, as compared to the people who take the time to edit their photos. perhaps from the upload time we are able to sift out the pros from the amateur photographer.
In addition to that, we would also be able to see the geographical location where most number of photos have been taken and the most number of photos that have been uploaded in a single time.
We could probably tell where these Flickr photographers reside, and how long do they take to upload a photograph.
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Based on the photo metadata, we are able to tell many things, and I think that it is essential that we do not ignore such information. Flickr is a wonderful place to host photographs, but I think that Facebook is a better place to share photographs.
Data visualization indeed can come in many forms, whether it be from just the data from a single image, or the collected information from a census. I believe that this exercise taught us to look at every little thing, and the things we take for granted, such as a photograph, and to tell us that visualizations can be found anywhere, if only we just put in the time and effort to produce it.
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