Saturday, September 2, 2006

Photos and Locative Tagging

Flickr launched a new geotagging feature this week (via). It's tied in with Yahoo's mapping API; via Flickr, you can assign locative data to your photos simply by drag-and-drop methods. The Flickr blog reports an impressive surge in the geotagging of photographs with some 1.2 million geotagged in the first 24 hours after the feature's rollout.

Granted, if a photo already had geotags assigned, the new system automatically recognized them, so a fair portion of the 1.2 million were probably auto-assigned rather than initiated by Flickr users.

Several months ago I made use of some of the earlier geotagging efforts, which established grid coordinates as tags unto themselves.

The new scheme, however, keeps the locative data under the hood and instead offers a simple link to a map alongside a label indicating "Taken in/near <placename>."

After months of thinking they were defunct, it turns out that all of the old geotags haven't gone to waste.

They're working to post the photos assigned geographic data in the tags to sites like loc.alize.us.

Posted by Derek Mueller at September 2, 2006 8:45 PM to Rhetorico-Geography