November 18, 2007

Flickr Releases New Geographical Features

Mark Hendrickson

16 comments »

Yahoo’s popular photo-sharing site Flickr will release on Monday the two new geography-related features we reported on a month ago: Flickr Places and a new world map.

While we have not yet had the opportunity to test these new releases, 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. So, 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.

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. It appears as though photos will be linked to the map using traditional geo-tragging 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 and in eight languages.

We recently reported that Flickr had passed the two billion stored photos mark.

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  1. Flickr Places y Flickr World Map

Comments

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  1. Daniel

    No screenshots? :(

  2. Scott Schiller

    #1: Try the “month ago” link for screenshots.

  3. David Chartier

    Could TechCrunch please use more accurate wording in headlines like this? If Flickr indeed “releases” these features, I would be able to head over to Flickr.com, sign into my account and begin using them.

    As you wrote in the post, Flickr “will release” these features tomorrow, i.e., they are not available now. This makes your headline (and many before it) a bit frustrating.

    I’d like to suggest you guys word headlines about features that have yet to be released more accurately. For example, this headline should read: “Flickr to release new geographic features,” immediately letting the reader know that these aren’t out yet. Otherwise you’re more or less misleading us.

    And no one like to be misled.

  4. www.CARversation.com

    wow that is so cool.

  5. joel badinas dot com

    Are they using Google Maps? (^_^)

  6. rick

    Excellent, I’m really glad Flickr isn’t losing the initiative on this. I honestly thought that some startup would swoop in and corner the market on this type of thing, but good for them.

  7. Steve Ballmer

    [insert futile attempt to be witty here]
    [shamelessly promote personal website here]

  8. Tech For Novices

    #3 - “Releases New” keywords ? Do they trigger techmeme to include it on their main page ? We guess so..

    #6 - Are we doing it right ?

  9. Nick

    I love Flickr. It’s the best social network of them all, has a real feeling to it.
    I get notifications from 8hands whenever a friend of mine uploads photos, so I’m always updated with what’s going on. It’s great.

  10. michael lewis

    This is cool but WHERE IS VIDEO SUPPORT?? Honestly, that is the number 1 requirement and they should stop releasing stuff until that is done

  11. dave8

    I love Flickr too. I had both a Flickr and smugmug account and I recently closed the smugmug account. Everything works great at Flickr — the mechanics, social networking, you name it. End of story.

  12. dave8

    Video? Personally I wish that Flickr wouldn’t trash things up with video.

  13. Andy

    Seriously Flickr, either release the video compatability or tell us you’re not going to do it.

    I (for one) really want the ability to put a little video of my kids playing so relatives can see it, alongside the family snaps.

    But just talking about it occasionally, but not actually doing anything, is really infuriating. I’m fine with “no” (I’ll go elsewhere), but “possibly maybe, one day, perhaps” is just sitting on the fence. Well I hope you get splinters.

  14. Thilo

    That’s good news, I didn’t like the geo features before, they were so difficult to handle.

  15. Christoph

    Ahm, where is it?