Flickr's built-in geocoding - your photos on Yahoo Maps

Flickr has released a built-in manual geocoding interface for photos, which uses Yahoo Maps, naturally (Yahoo owns Flickr).

In Organizr, you bring up the map tab, and then drag and drop photos (or groups of photos) to locations.

In your photo view, you will NOT see geotags (tags giving latitude and longitude).  Instead you see a new item with a map link.

But the super-cool part is "Explore photos taken near this one"

so bringing that up, I see

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rakerman/49297177/map/?view=everyones

http://www.flickr.com/map/?&fLat=55.678825&fLon=12.575568&zl=5&min_upload_date=946713600&min_taken_date=1970-01-01%2000:00:00

including below my photo a browser of photos "very near" my image, leading to this geocoded photo of the Rundetaarn from outside.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bluespot/164258580/

This is going to be quite amazing, as you can now discover an entire universe of photos through a map interface, with lots of people likely to code their photos.

via FlickrBlog Great shot - where'd you take that?
via The Map Room Flickr Adds Geotagging

I still have lots more to explore, I will update this posting as I do.

For one thing, it's clear that Yahoo needs to buy a lot more detailed road-level information worldwide - they have hardly any road/street map info for Copenhagen, although their satellite image is good.

Also see my page of resources on geocoding photos as well as previous entries in my Mapping category.

UPDATE 21:51 - It appears the default is for Flickr to ONLY map-ify photos that were geotagged, that is, that had tags "geotagged", "geo:lat=x", "geo:long=y".

UPDATE 22:13 - If you have geotagged photos that were NOT properly imported, try

http://flickr.com/account/geo/import/

If you have geocoded photos (photos with lat, long in the EXIF) I don't know if there is any way to retrospectively map them.  There is a new preference at

http://flickr.com/account/geo/exif/

That will automatically Flickr-mapify any NEW photos you upload that have EXIF-GPS info.
I have tested this by uploading a Picasa-Google Earth geocoded image and it worked fine... sort of.

There is a potentially major issue: the location it is showing in Google Earth is off by a couple metres from the location in Yahoo Maps.  If a couple metres is not a big deal to you, then this will be ok.  Compare:

Picasa-Google Earth location

Flickr-Yahoo Maps location, from EXIF

The image itself in Flickr is

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rakerman/227784994/

UPDATE 2006-08-29: You may wonder (particularly based on the above) what happens if you adjust an EXIF-coded photo to a new location.  Based on what I've read at Thomas Hawk's Digital Connection, Flickr won't touch the EXIF - the new map position will only be accessible through the Flickr interface and API.

Comments

[Eduardo Manchon]

I just thought you may be also interested in Panoramio, a community of geolocated photos with drag and drop interface over Google Maps.

In Panoramio photos with geodata in EXIF are automatically located and later all geolocated photos can be watched in Google Earth through KML feed.