Photos on a Map

I have a number of thoughts around richer presentation of photos in my photo gallery beyond the simplistic album/category display I currently have, and for almost a year now, I've been wanting to do something. But progress has been slow, and the scope of the project has been growing because I tend to lump up learning new technologies and stuff along with the functionality itself. Anyway, one of the big items on my list of ideas has been to get some really rich visuals around photos on a map.

Given my current scripting mindset (from Atlas project work), I was pretty excited when Virtual Earth was recently released publicly, and came along with an API I could use to prototype some ideas (there have obviously been other implementations - the geotagging concept seems to be gathering some interest lately).

The virtual earth API is actually really simple, but functional... just a bit of JavaScript-object dumping and inspection was sufficient to reveal the model (I didn't find any public OM - is there one? Virtual Earth team?). Within an hour I had a simple map with pushpins working. The harder parts of the weekend project were actually grappling with some DHTML-sizing (I tried CSS layout - it simply doesn't work for a whole range of scenarios... I really dislike CSS when it comes to defining layout... but I deviate...), and getting the images and visuals ready. On the left is a screenshot of the UI - you'll really have to try it out for yourself to be able to get the full effect, and see photos in their full size, by heading over to this prototype photo map page. Of course it inherits for free all the work from virtual earth to get smooth panning, zooming, mouse wheel, road map view, aerial view, etc. etc.

It works in IE and Firefox, but you'll really need IE to see all the snazzy fade effects implemented using filters and transitions.