Tuesday, June 09, 2009

Footopedia - Wikipedia for photos



Fotopedia is breathing new life into photos by building a photo encyclopedia that lets photographers and photo enthusiasts collaborate and enrich images to be useful for the whole world wide web.

A few words from the founder:
“After traveling the world, I wanted to share my photos with others. Flickr and other photo sites give you exposure for only a brief window in time, and adding photos to wikipedia proved too complicated for the average user. This sparked the idea for a ‘wikipedia of photos’ – that combines the permanence and community collaboration of wikipedia with the ease of use of consumer desktop applications.” - Jean-Marie Hullot, founder of Fotonauts, former CTO of NeXT Software and Apple’s Application Division.

Fotopedia is a cross between Flickr and Wikipedia, serving as an archive of “images for humanity.” You can turn any photo album from your Fotopedia desktop client into a Web page entry on Fotopedia, complete with tags, associated Wikipedia entry, and Google Map information where available.And you can post your album on Twitter, Flickr and Facebook.

Photographers can add photos of specific places and on specific topics, all tagged and organized by Fotonauts. You may choose if you want your album be presented for consideration for the Fotopedia photo encyclopedia, under the corresponding index or title which you file it under.

There are over 150,000 high-quality photos already, organized into 4,501 “articles”, and anyone can access albums for a variety of topics, places, people and more. Each article is a Web slide show, along with the associated Wikipedia entry and Google Map. Photos contain metadata making them easily searchable.

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