Geotagging

You all know what a fan of tagging I am. I think user generated metadata is a very important discovery mechanism. Last week Flickr announced the availability of geotags and I finally got around to geotagging my most recent Flickr photos this morning.

First of all, its simple to do. Flickr has this cool screencast which shows you how to do it. But once I figured out that you do it with the organize tab, I was golden. There’s a great maps interface (Yahoo Maps) and you simply type in the location of where you took the photo, find the exact location, and then type in the tags of the photos you want to put there, then drag and drop. Flickr does the rest, geotags them on the fly, and you are done. This screenshot shows what it looks like.

Once your photos are geotagged, they become discoverable by location. Stewart Butterfield said that two days after its geotagging tool was released, more than two million
photos location tags were added. In addition, Flickr has released a kit that allows software
engineers to build their own applications that include Flickr’s
geotagging tools. I can see so many applications of this. It’s really great.

Here is a map with the location of my tagged photos.  Here’s a map of all the public geotagged photos in Aspen, Colorado. I contributed a few of those.

Very Cool.