Yesterday Flickr announced the previously leaked new feature, an integration of Yahoo! Maps and Flickr.
It is very slick, the integration between Organizr and the maps is way kewl and it does not suffer from the problem of making a mess of your Tags like some of the other options as it maintains an internal data structure.
Their map placing method isn’t too accurate but if you open up a photos properties you can type in exact coordinates which is nice. Searching for photos is now even greater, you can search for photos matching a keyword near a location, or simply explore photos at a specific spot which is great.
The problem is of course that they use Yahoo! Maps, it’s crap unless you live in the states. Resolution and street level maps in Europe and elsewhere leaves much to be desired. It is also much slower than Google Maps.
Today Flickr posted an update to their blog firstly pointing out the amazing uptake in use of this feature in the first 24 hours:
When we were doing our projections for how many photos Flickr members would geotag, we though that we’d hit Spiral Jetty a million in the first month, maybe even as fast as two weeks. Instead, 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). Crazy!
That is impressive! they also acknowledge the Yahoo Maps problem and I hope they can work with the maps team to quickly address this, though I am not holding my breath, more likely is someone will take the new API calls that Flickr provide and write a mashup using Google Maps that uploads data into this new internal data structures.
I dragged a couple 100 photos onto the map, you can take a look at a map of these here.
