Digital Home Thoughts: World Wide Media Exchange

It appears that Microsoft Research has been working on a fantastic project called WWMX that uses digital mapping software and global positioning data to sort and present digital photos by precisely where in the world they were taken. Dubbed the World-Wide Media eXchange, it tries to organize the ever-expanding database of photos submitted to the project by digital-camera users. There is a web demo available that will give you a real quick idea of how the software works. "People using the program can click on various points on a digital map of the world and see photos taken at those precise locations, or select photos and see where they were snapped. At the same time, photos in the database can be sorted and viewed based on the date they were shot."



The standalone application (picture above) has a wonderful interface with a selectable, hi-res map of the world on the left, and thumbnails of all the photographs in the project on the right. One can select points in the map or regions and the list of images on the right will update dynamically and in real time. I like the user interface of the program quite a bit, though one odd thing is that hovering on the thumbnails gives an extremely blurred preview of the picture. It took some time to figure out that clicking on the preview gives a nice hi-res version (I guess the blurred preview is to increase speed in reviewing). I recommend that you guys play around with this slick piece of code :).