About 20 people gathered at the National Museum of Denmark at 10 o'clock last Saturday morning - it was great to see a mix of different ages, as well as a close-enough gender balance. The day started off with an introduction by Søren, followed by a presentation of Mapillary by Peter. People were captivated by the power of Mapillary and the questions did not want to end. At the same time, we were all eager to get to the main event of the day - geocoding historical images.

Søren gave us a demo of the whole process and had assigned a historical image to each participant to geocode. The images were from the online collection of the National Museum of Denmark and included information about the location and date taken in text format. It was our job to use the Geosetter program to assign that info to the image itself (as EXIF metadata), so that it could be uploaded to Mapillary like any other image that carries location coordinates and a time stamp.

Photo by Jacob Wang

This exercise was a lot of fun, since to use the program we had to imagine where the photographer had been standing and determine the correct viewing angle to the building on the photo. In addition, the only time information that we had of the images was the year, while the program required a date and time as well. Since I was working in a team with two other participants, we got into heated discussions about whether the picture looks like summer or winter, morning or evening... Talk about playing detective!

After that we headed outside to try out mapping with Mapillary and take some photos of Copenhagen today. E.g. we did a round of honour around Christiansborg.

Photo by Rachel Bisch

This is what came out of it:

Back at the museum we had some lunch and continued with the geocoding, while Søren also talked about uploading the images to Wikimedia. Last, Jacob Wang from the National Museum of Denmark briefly introduced an ongoing project which should enable easier geocoding of historical images in the future.

It's really cool to do time travelling in the Mapillary viewer (using the right and left arrows):

And the historical vs contemporary image also looks awesome on this kind of slider that Søren has built:

This is derived from Microformats.dk.

We really want to thank Søren for organising this wonderful event! Also the National Museum of Denmark (particularly Jacob Wang) for their hospitality, providing us with the room as well as a lovely coffee break. Last, but not least, great thanks to all the people who participated! Looking forward to the future events of Maptime Copenhagen (join the Meetup group here)!

And if you can read Danish, then you can also check out the post about this event on Søren's blog.

/Katrin