mobilized data: Flickr georeferencing after one day

It's amazing what people will do when you give them the tools.  Flickr has a new blog posting about Geotagging - one day later.

24 hours in, there were 1,234,384 geotagged photos (and now more than 1.6 million geotagged photos as I write this, about 9 hours later)

I don't know how many of those were already tagged and just got imported, and how many are newly georeferenced photos, but I'm guessing many hundreds of thousands and perhaps even the majority were just done yesterday.

They also talk about the scale of Flickr and the challenges of searching in real-time.

More than 228,000,000 photos have been uploaded, with over a million new photos being added on a good day. There are billions of bits of data that go into the search (more than half a billion tags alone), along with privacy controls, group membership, and so on.

As well, they have released the geo API, in case you'd still rather see your photos on Google Maps or in Google Earth etc.  As far as I understand, you should consider location a separate meta attribute - it will no longer show up as a tag and it won't be inserted by Flickr into the EXIF.

I think this is a very interesting topic, I'm trying to find the best way to attach the geographic coordinates in a mostly automated fashion, by GPS timestamp correlation.  I have more info on various geocoding options on my geocoding photos page.

UPDATE 2006-09-04: There are now over 2.5 million (2,574,649) georeferenced photos on Flickr.