Fotonotes for annotating images

FotoNotes Homepage. Move your mouse pointer over the image below to see the annotations.

After wrestling with mod_rewrite I finally have FotoNotes working. You’ve probably seen this on flickr, here’s the info from the FotoNotes homepage:

Probably the best known derivation of FotoNotes is Flickr’s note feature. Flickr did their own implementation, but Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake is nice enough to credit me: “Greg Elin of Fotonotes fame, who is responsible for us adding the annotations you can make on Flickr photographs.”

Here’s an interesting part from the read me included with the code.

(c) FotoNotes, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
FNServer, FotoNoter, FotoNotes, and fotonotesplugin.php are
open source and available under the Open Software License
v 2.1 (http://www.opensource.org/licenses/osl-2.1.php).
FotoNotes is patent-pending.

You may implement the FotoNotes specification in your
own code an applications royalty-free in exchange for
attribution under the Creative Commons by Attribution
License. See http://fotonotes.net/spec/index.cgi?AttributionFormats
for more information, including commercial licensing options.

So thanks Greg Elin and FotoNotes hackers for the code, I think it can be very useful for online learning, I’m trying to show that with the Edubuntu image above but it seems rather obvious you could take a photo of the inside of a PC and say to students identify 4 things or maybe at the Wikiversity school of plant science say identify 4 parts of this plant. Here’s the Mediawiki Fotonotes extension. If I used a bigger image for this desktop example above it would be much better. I can do that on the Wiki later.

Its really interesting how the XML is stored in the JPEG Header, hopefully we can get some comments from computer scientists talking about that.