Thursday 4 September 2008

Geograph: an image for every square kilometre in the UK

We’ve had a really good August at home this year walking local footpaths and finding places that we’ve never been to before, all within a 5 mile radius of home. The motivator for all of this activity has been the Geograph website.

If you are not familiar with the site, then the aim of Geograph is to collect photographs for every square kilometre within the UK. 88% of England, Scotland & Wales now have at least one photo per kilometre square and 22% of Ireland has been covered.

This is a really useful website if you need images of the UK, first because all images are shared under the Creative Commons License (this means that although the photographer owns the copyright they have agreed to other people using their images). Second because the images are a reasonable size (640 pixels wide) they are very useful for projecting on an interactive whiteboard. So forget those tiddly little snippets that you find through searching Google Images – most of which are covered by copyright – and nearly all of which are useless for projecting and start exploring Geograph.

So log-on to their website: www.geograph.org.uk

Choose a place – it’s not very good at recognising postcodes – so either the place name or a four figure Grid reference work best.

If you want to see where I’ve been walking, then you could start in the west on the Moorland above Langsett ( SE1800 in the search box or http://www.geograph.org.uk/gridref/SE1800 should take you directly there) and try working your way east towards the M1 motorway.