Hash Gordon allows news sites to embed collections of images

The Guardian's n0tice project has released Hash Gordon, a tool that allows news sites to embed collections of images shared on social media and fed into n0tice.

Images are searched for and embedded via a tag, enabling news outlets to display collections of photographs, many of them shared on Instagram.

Searching for a tag – such as 'remembrance', 'fireworks' or 'election2012' – will display images that have been shared and then fed into n0tice, an online noticeboard used by news sites, hyperlocals and community groups launched last year.

You can see examples of collections of images tagged 'occupysandy', 'pumpkin' and 'flooding'. As many Instagram images are geotagged, Hash Gordon also provides a map view showing the locations of the photos. Here is an example of a map of images tagged 'earthquake'.

Matt McAlister, who leads the n0tice project, told Journalism.co.uk that the team had been "looking at different ways that n0tice can be used on different websites".

He explained how during Hurricane Sandy "tonnes and tonnes of fascinating photos were appearing on n0tice and it made sense to try a gallery format".

Hash Gordon was launched on Friday (9 November) and follows the release of other tools by n0tice, including FeedWax. FeedWax allows n0tice users to add an automated feed of geotagged tweets, Instagram photos and more into n0tice, while Hash Gordon allows news sites, including non-n0tice users, to take photos out of the platform.

Images can be searched for by n0tice user or noticeboard as well as by tag, and the collection can then be embedded with journalists able to alter the size of the images in the collection. Readers can see the source and details of who took the photo by hovering the cursor over the image.

Hash Gordon has already been used by the Guardian, with the news site displaying a collection of images on the Guardian homepage on Friday (9 November).



On Thursday (8 November) the music section of the Guardian encouraged readers to share pictures of their favourite band t-shirts on Instagram using the hashtag #bestbandtee.

The Guardian fed those pictures into a 'best band' noticeboard using FeedWax, the editor then clicked 'n0tice this' on each image selected to appear in the photo gallery, and used Hash Gordon to embed the collection.

As with the code for other projects, n0tice has published Hash Gordon with an open licence to Github.

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