English

flickr adds Israel’s Maps Back On

ע״י עידו גנוט

פורסם ב 15/11/2012

After only 3 days of online protest world wide flickr added Israel’s maps to its mapping service. This has been done following our article which reported the issue earlier this week.

Well dear friends – we are happy to say that the protest worked. Only three days after we published the story, flickr – the online photo sharing service added full maps of Israel to its online map service (which allow photographers to perform Geotagging for their images). The maps flickr used are based on openstreetmap.org and will probably be replaced later on by more accurate maps of Israel currently being developed by Nokia.

flickr – Israel – now back on the map

We would like to thank Giora Pinhasi who was the first to recognize the issue and Noam Galai who helped a great deal by publishing the story in English on the Fstoppers website (from there it spread like wildfire across the web and also helped us receive official response from both Yahoo! – flickr parent company and Nokia – all published in our original article). Finally we would like to thank all of you – our readers who helped push this story through social networks and by directly contacting the companies – you made this happen!

Before we wrap things up a few more points:

The purpose of the original story was not to attack anybody but rather to raise an issue which effect photographers who use the flickr service and would like to tag images taken in Israel.
The entire thing could have been resolved without any media “noise” if flickr/Yahoo! would have simply given us a satisfactory answer before we even published the story (they actually had plenty of time to do that – we waited about two weeks for an answer that never came… Do your homework next time guys and treat the media more seriously).
Finally, if anybody still had any doubts regarding the effectiveness of an online campaign of this sort I am sure they are all gone now – in this new online digital age the power is in your hands to change that which needs to be changed.

עידו גנוט

עידו גנוט הוא עורך ומייסד אתר הצילום מגה פיקסל. הוא מסקר חדשות טכנולוגיה מאז סוף שנות ה-90 וכתב וערך עבור שורה של מגזינים בינלאומיים מובילים. הוא עוסק בתחום הצילום מאז שנת 2009. עידו הוא גם מייסד שותף בחברת ההפקה Shooteat.co.il העוסקת ביצירת תוכן ויזואלי עבור חברות מסחריות.