GeoCommons on Wikimedia Commons

Google Earth with placemarks from Commons (open thumbnail to see)

Google Earth with a placemark open

Number of geocoded images on Commons

GeoCommons is a project to show geocoded images from Wikimedia Commons in Google Earth.

The images are plotted as icons so as not to obscure the ground view, and open up on a mouse click. If the heading parameter is provided in the tag, the icon points to the direction of the camera's viewpoint.

Installation

Load GeoCommons.kml in Google Earth and start browsing!
The file is only a pointer to the database, so it doesn't have to be reloaded for new data.

If you don't have the Google Earth program yet, a free download is available here .
(Windows 2000/XP/Vista, Mac OS X, Linux)

The images can also be browsed on Google Maps, but the thumbnails are smaller and placemarks less accurate.

Functionality

When the GeoCommons layer is active, the program sends its viewpoint coordinates to GeoCommons on the toolserver whenever the user moves around in Google Earth. GeoCommons finds the images in that view from a spatial R-tree database and returns a compressed response to the Google Earth program. The response currently contains at most 100 points, making sure the "best of Commons" is included. The criteria for choosing the images is currently their featured, quality image and picture of the day status. The database updates follow the toolserver replication lag.

How can I help?

Upload your photos to Commons
Geocode existing photos (see category gallery)
Refine geocoding of inaccurately placed images (see list)
Watch recent geocoding changes to monitor the quality

Similar projects

Wikipedia World - Geocoded Wikipedia articles or images from articles in Google Earth
WikiMiniAtlas on Commons - Geocoded Commons images displayed on a Javascript map
All Panoramio photos KML
Geograph British Isles KML
Flickr (through another site) KML

For more information about geocoding in Wikimedia Projects, see Wikipedia:WikiProject Geographical coordinates and Commons:Geocoding.

Credits

GeoCommons by Para
Dynamic Google Earth implementation based on Wikipedia World by Kolossos
Database dump parser based on parsecommonsdump.pl by Dschwen

Note! This project is in no way affiliated with GEOCOMMONS from FortiusOne.

Commons:User:Para - para _at_ toolserver _dot_ org