Geotagging Flickr

At last! Geotagging is the art of adding geographical data, such as latitude/longitude, to photos. This makes it easy to search for photos by location, to see nearby photos or to put all photos on a map. Flickr, my favourite photo gallery site, have now added built-in geotagging (digg story), something that previously only could be done with third party hacks, and never as easy as now.

It’s dead simple to geotag a photo – just go to Organize and click Map. Then just drag the photos to desired location! The hardest part is knowing where the photos acutally were taken However, even though I’m very happy Flickr made this update, there are some things that are not so good. I am sure they will be fixing some of these issues in the coming time – the sooner the better. I have geotagged all my 650 photos now, and during the process I found both bugs and other shortcomings:

• The map data is not as good as Google Maps, and certainly not as good as Google Earth (both were used before for geotagging in Flickr). Flickr is using Yahoo Maps, and they should definately get some better map data soon for the rest of the world, because so many flickrites are traveling all over.
• It is somewhat buggy. It fails in counting the photos when you zoom out, so now it is sometimes reporting incorrect number of photos for some of my locations. It also misses to map out photo locations close to the edge of the current map view.
• Some interface things should be corrected. When you drag a photo to an existing location, the map often scrolls in the last second, so that the photo is placed on a new location instead. Also, if you drag a photo before the whole page has loaded, you will get some strange bugs.

Nevertheless, thank you Flickr for this wonderful feature. As I’ve said, I have geotagged all my photos. Celebrate with me by checking out my photo map. I have also added photos from my trips this summer. A small preview: