Flickr adds support for geocoding
The popular photo sharing website Flickr introduced native support for geotagging photos on Monday.
Because of the flexibility of the system, there have been a number of options around for a while that have allowed users to geotag their photos. None of them have been quite as simple as Flickr have just made it though. And it's great to see that the guy that built the first geotagging mashup of Flickr and Google Maps - Rev Dan Catt - was actually the person that Yahoo recruited to build up the geotagging functionality within the site itself.
The new geotagging system is really easy to use, it's functional and it's pretty at the same time. It also has a geotagging API that developers can plug into if they wish.
The thing that surprises me is the lack of support for GeoRSS in their feeds. With all this location information flying around (1.2 million photos geotagged within the first day) it would make sense to include that geodata in the RSS feeds from the site. I'd really like to be able to pull geotagged photos from my Flickr stream into my geoblog and photos section over at geodan.org and have their location information automatically assigned based on the information stored against them in Flickr.
You can also see my map of photos on Flickr.
Comments
re: Flickr adds support for geocoding
Acutally GeoRSS is planned."geoRSS will be rolling out soon. We haven't yet for two reasons ...1) we want to make sure the servers are all doing well.2) we want to get enough photos in there for it to make sense."
re: Flickr adds support for geocoding
Ah, thanks James - that's great news! I must have missed that part, or just be looking in the wrong places :)
re: Flickr adds support for geocoding
Some discussion here:http://www.flickr.com/groups/geotagging/discuss/72157594165676818/I wish Dan would blog about it on his site so it would be easier to reference. The flickr forums are kinda messed up.
re: Flickr adds support for geocoding
It would also be nice if when geotagging a new photo, it would add that information as tags to fit in with the old scheme. Perhaps with GeoRSS, the need for this would be overcome because geotags would be included anyway, and you could select only geotagged photos as a stream?
