Geocoding on Flickr
Flickr added geo tagging of photos today. The new feature allows users to place their photos on a map and explore other peoples photos interactively. There are over 323,626 geotagged photos on flickr (well at least that many with the tag ‘geotagged ‘) and this space is set to explode now that they have added this feature for everyone. There are already some cameras and quite a few phones with GPS in-built, so soon we will be able to geo tag photos directly from the camera without user intervention!
Zooomr, loc.alise.us, geobloggers.com (well the old site anyway) and, of course, mapsack all allow you to put photos on a map, so I suppose this kind of pulls the carpet from under them. Now, from my initial impressions of the flickr system its not actually that good. For a start they (not surprisingly) used yahoo maps which dont present the same quality of mapping or speed compared to google maps. Secondly, loading times for the markers seems to be quite slow, and there are a few other bugs (“page 1 of null” for example), but this is early days, I should give them a chance! At the moment though, I would say mapsack and loc.alise.us gives a much better interface!
Flickr seems to have used the AJAX version of yahoo maps and not the flash version. Why? The flash version seems to offer much more interaction compared to the AJAX version.
