Today Flickr released a lot of new functionality related to geotagging – one of my favorite pieces of metadata and the real basis for my photo maps that I made this summer. Check out the official Flickr blog post for instructions on how to use their geotagging tools. This latest release is the first really powerful result of Flickr’s aquisition by Yahoo! that I am aware of. Hopefully they’ll do more in the future, even if it’s as simple as having a link from reviews on autos.yahoo.com to Flickr photos of the same car.
Anyway, I’m still trying out their geotagging features, so if I experience anything particularly noteworthy, I’ll let you know. I still have a few questions for which I need to find answers:
1. They say that this geo information is not stored as a “geo:” tag. How then, is it stored?
2. Depending on how it’s stored, how much do I have to change my map application to use the new tags?
3. Is it worth it to update my map application? The functionality I have that is not yet implemented by Flickr is the ability to view the photos directly on the map (as opposed to having to click to view every photo) and the ability to view photos by date/as a slideshow. I can’t imagine it will be much longer before we can do that stuff in Flickr, though, and I know they can make their site much more responsive than mine. In order to get around the cross-domain XMLHttpRequest object limitation, I have to spoof the AJAX requests through another server, which slows the site down a lot.
If anyone out there has any opinions on the last question, let me know. I’m not sure what to do right now.
