Inferring Location from Geotagged Photos

Geotagging has become a recent phenomenon that allows users to visualize and manage photo collections in many new and interesting ways. Unfortunately, manual geotagging of a large collection of pictures on the globe is still a time-consuming and laborious task even though geotagging devices are gradually being adopted. At the same time, users often provide tag annotations, which may contain useful geographic cues, for their pictures. In this paper, I would like to explore using annotations for inferring the location of images. Using a collection of over a million geotagged pictures, I like to build location probability maps for tag annotations over the entire globe. These maps reflect the collective picture-taking and tagging behaviours of thousands of users from all over the world. Furthermore, user annotations alone can be used to infer the location of pictures with good accuracy.