re: #18 otoc

According to the Instagram SDK for the iPhone, it simply passes the location_id from the phone. I didn’t spend time with the Android which I assume has minor differences. But to assume it is geohashing when the sdk and Instagram notices and interviews say geotag pretty much point to geotag.

That’s on the client device. We generally don’t know what’s happening on the server side. However in the case of Instagram, they’ve said they use Postgres and PostGIS, which stores point geometry as actual latitude and longitude values.

Had he used Flickr it would be a different story - their locations include an accuracy value, which I assume corresponds to the bit length of a geohashed location.

The key things are:

1) We don’t know the accuracy of the geodata coming from client device
2) We may not know if the server is storing and/or returning the same value
3) Maps of locations may make tradeoffs in accuracy for display clarity.