commons-app
Nearby: show class icon
Wikidata has icons for most popular classes: bus station, university, school, religious edifice, etc. https://m.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P2910
On the nearby map, show icon of the Wikidata class of the item. Shown on a map or list, it would allow to quickly decide what nearby items to go for. For instance, I could choose to avoid schools as it could be seen as creepy to go take pictures on a school day, and rather focus on statues.
If we want more control on icon style we could also use something like https://github.com/nicolas-raoul/Icons-for-Wikidata
On Wikidata, icons are defined using https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P2910 and there is also https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P487 ("unicode") which may have an emoji of the entity.
Emojis may render consistently than icons to the user. On the other hand, icons cover a larger range of things.
See also https://github.com/commons-app/apps-android-commons/issues/289#issuecomment-293863756 for related queries.
The problem with Wikidata's use of emoji is that the goal is not to provide one emoji to each class, but only to assign each emoji to a particular class or item. So most classes do not have an emoji, and coverage is never going to be good.
On the opposite, for icons the goal is to have an item for each class, so coverage will continuously grow.
Do you think this would still be useful if filters were to be implemented?
Depending on how well filters are implemented, this could become less useful indeed.
This is a good idea, and Nicolas made me laugh, because I have a school near me that still needs a photo, but I have the same concerns :-)
