An ordinary person can’t do much to help with the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, but for an ordinary person with a smartphone, it’s a different story.

The Visualization Center at San Diego State University and Crisis Commons, an online community that uses technology to respond to crises, will release a free smartphone application in the next few days that people can use to document the oil spill’s effects on the coastline. When users take pictures of the coast with the new application, Slick View, the photo will be sent back to San Diego with a time stamp and a GPS location attached. The center will process all the images and piece maps together of the coast along the Gulf of Mexico. The maps, which will be available to the public, will show the changes along the coast over time.

“If you took tens of thousands of pictures, especially if you took them all at once, you would have an extraordinary view of the oil spill in a way that’s never existed before,” said Eric Frost, director of the Visualization Center.

People involved in seeking remedies for the disaster can use the maps to figure out where to use oil-containment booms and to see where oil made it through booms. Scientists can use the data to study the oil’s effect on vegetation or to predict how hurricane season might affect the spill, for instance.

“It helps the people that are actually trying to respond, which is pretty much every single community in the region,” Mr. Frost said.

He stressed the educational value of the application and the data set it is expected to collect. Dozens of universities near the spill will be involved in the project, and Mr. Frost said that students will learn much more about the spill if they’re on the ground taking photos in an effort to help.

“It’s a different way of teaching and a different way of learning, and it focuses on what you might call real time and massive amounts of data,” he said.