After I wrote about loc.alize.us, the service that mashes together Google maps and Flickr to support the geotagging of photos, Flickr today revealed their own geotagging integration.
The tagging is done inside the Organize section of a person’s account, a new tab called Map appeared there today. They use Yahoo maps, which unfortunately don’t support all of Europe in as great a detail as Google maps does. The upside is that Flickr recognised the photos I had already tagged with loc.alize.us and imported them nicely into their own map.
Tagging is easy, as you can just drag and drop your photos in there. The fact that it’s done inside the organising area makes for much faster tagging than with loc.alize.us, but as mentioned above, Yahoo maps simply aren’t as good as Google maps. I hope they’ll catch up soon.
Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like when you drag a photo onto the map:
It’s also possible to just drag and drop a bunch of photos in there. That’ll be a time-saver, once I decide to actually tag all of my 900+ photos.
When you look at your photostream and click the map button, they show you the map with the tagged pictures indicated in pink:
Overall, the whole implementation is really quite smooth, and apart from the fact that they have to use their master’s map service, it’s a good addition to the service. By the way, before you can start tagging, they show a little disclaimer about privacy, and let you decide the default permissions for who can view your geo-tags. Nice that someone’s thinking about the fact that there are indeed a whole bunch of weird people out there, for whom geotagging of photos is probably a recurring wet dream.
I love the way they incorporated this in the main Flickr app but like you said, Yahoo maps kinda suck for Europeans. For instance: try looking up Eurodisney Paris in yahoo maps. Prettu hard, but I’ll give you a hint: it’s that blurry spot in a circle somewhere east of Paris. Found it? Compare it to this: http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&sll=49.002069,2.54694&sspn=0.072862,0.21698&q=eurodisney&ie=UTF8&om=1&z=18&ll=48.870361,2.779959&spn=0.002283,0.005032&t=h
Yahoo has some assests to buy, I guess.
Flickr geotagging interface is brilliant, but Yahoo Maps coverage for most of the World is very poor. This is a important issue because Flickr’s geotagging interface is not designed for accuracy, but for massive geotagging, what it is perfect for some people, but not for others.
If you prefer Google Maps for mapping your photos, Panoramio, may be interesting for you. Btw, you can later watch the photos in Google Earth KML feed, a much better experience than web based maps.
You can see Eurodisney in Panoramio:
http://www.panoramio.com/map/#lt=48.872393&ln=2.777138&z=1&k=2&a=1
Eduardo
Hello Eduardo, thanks for your comment. Do you make use of the Flickr API, or would I have to upload my photos again?
Hi Richard,
Sorry, for the moment Panoramio doesn’t use Flickr API, so it means that you have to upload your photos again. Anyway the uploading system in Panoramio is quite fast, you can upload as many photos as you want by once. Hope you have some time to try it
Cheers,
Eduardo