Browsing through some photos from the marathon, I wondered why the folks that take pictures at marathons around the world and then sell them to you don’t crowd source their work.
There were maybe 250,000 or even 300,000 people out watching the London Marathon this weekend and many of them had cameras.
Assuming that the same technology that google uses to blur faces and number plates in Street View and the same technology that captures number plates for the Congestion Charge can be used to read the numbers/names on photos such as the one at left …
Then why couldn’t anyone who took photos upload them to a site where they could be searched by anyone looking for photos of themselves running?
A download would result in a small payment to the person who took the photo and a payment to the marathon photo company for facilitating the transaction. It would be like the iPhone App Store, but you wouldn’t need any coding talent.
I’m pretty sure all of this could be pretty much fully automated and so the variety of photos available to runners would be multiplied enormously at practically no extra cost to the services that allow you to search for photos.
