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“Yahoo’s popular photo-sharing site Flickr will release on Monday the two new geography-related features introduced a month ago: Flickr Places and a new world map…”
San Francisco — Yahoo Inc.’s online photo-sharing site, said on Sunday the company plans to offer this week, by introducing a set of mapping features that makes it easier to find photos based on their location.
Starting on Monday, Flickr will unveil a way for Web users to browse photos from tens of millions of geographically located photos loaded up to its site, http://www.flickr.com/.
The service, called “Places,” identifies on a global map the latest hot-spots for photo contributions.
“It is a new way to browse what is happening in the world,” said Kakul Srivastava, senior director of product management at Flickr.
While the Places feature appears to be the most substantial of the two, Flickr has chosen 100,000 locations across the globe (such as cities, states, countries, and regions) and created pages to display photos taken at them.
For example, if you want to check out photos of Moscow, you can visit a Places page for that city and see a collection of photos from there. These pages will also show other local information such as maps, weather, and current times.
The global map view lets Flickr users see the latest photos by theme. Clicking on a category tag will take them to a selection of photos, giving them a glimpse of what other Flickr users collectively find interesting or newsworthy.
Flickr already has an interactive map for discovering geo-tagged photos taken at various locations around the world. Map improvements will largely be to the user interface; “hot tags” will now appear instead of simple, pink dots and a stream of photos called a “photo ribbon” will appear when you click on one of these hot tags.
The Places feature is designed to give the site more local appeal to users, as well as attract prospective travelers seeking to get beyond photos of landmarks for places they plan to visit.
Places pages for more than 100,000 locations include some local information such as regional maps, weather and the location’s current time. Flickr is adding 3,000 to 5,000 new location pages per week, Srivastava said.
Flickr counts more than 40 million monthly visitors and 2 billion photos stored on the 3-1/2-year-old site. Between 2.5 million and 3 million new photos are uploaded every day, with a growing percentage categorized by users according to location.
“Recently Flickr had passed the two billion stored photos mark.”
It appears as though photos will be linked to the map using traditional geo-tagging methods (there are no signs yet that Yahoo has integrated FireEagle with this mapping feature in any way).
These two improvements will be available to all Flickr users that is now available in eight languages that Flickr now offers: English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Korean and traditional Chinese.