It's Official: Flickr offers geotagging functionality

Earlier this month, I stumbled upon a feature that Flickr was working on, and wrote about my experience here on this blog. It disappeared shortly after making its appearance, and showed signs that it was still a work in progress (and an impressive one at that). Now it's official. Flickr just rolled out their geotagging components today, and they are wicked impressive.

Start by using the Organizer and selecting the Map tab. You're then presented with a Yahoo! Local Maps Beta-like interface (say that fast three times) on which you can drag and drop your photos to geotag them to your heart's content.


From what I've seen so far, it's pretty slick. They have some interface quirks to work out, to be sure, but I'm sure that we'll see those ironed out in due course. It will be interesting to see how the Flickr community uses these features. I know that geotagging has been around for a while, but in my opinion, it hasn't been available to such a large community with such a compelling interface.

I haven't explored as in depth as Thomas Hawk, so follow the link for his thorough review.

Update: For those of you who geotag your photos using another tool (or just have a really fancy camera), Rev Dan Catt pointed out that Flickr can read GPS information found in a photo's EXIF data when a photo is uploaded. You just need to turn it on.

Update 2: Flickr posted their own very informative post here.

Update 3: Flickr users have geotagged just over 1.2 million photos in just 24 hours!

Link

Flickr working on geotagging functionality?

I noticed something interesting this morning while organizing some of my photos on Flickr. On the Organize page, I spotted an additional tab on the top labeled "ADMIN:DEV". Clicking on it opened a world map (courtesy of Yahoo! Maps/NAVTEQ) and an options panel. That panel prompted me to set my default geotagging permissions for new photos (that is, who can see the geotagging information). After selecting "Everyone", I was presented a map to which I could drag and drop photos, thus tagging them with latitude and longitude information.

The photo selection dropdown list at the bottom of the screen also had additional selection criteria for "Your photos without geotagged information..." or something along those lines. At this point, I decided to cull some coordinates for a few pictures from Google Earth to give the new feature a whirl. When I returned, the tab was gone. Unfortunately, I didn't have the wherewithal to take screenshots, so I have to rely on memory.

The fact that the tab disappeared, along with its title (ADMIN:DEV) indicates that this is something that is obviously not ready for prime time. In my opinion, this would be a welcome feature for Flickr. There are already a number of people doing this, and it would be great to see that integrated with the Flickr experience. I have heard that Zooomr has some great geotagging functionality, but I haven't tried it yet. I'd be happy to see this show up on Flickr since I'm already a paid Pro user, and have spent a good deal of time tagging and organizing my photos there.

It's nice to see that some competition in the photo sharing space is breeding some new features!