BlogDale

From TechCrunch

Flickr added geo tagging functionality and search to its service earlier today. Adding location information on Flickr is done through the Organizr, under the Organize tab. In addition to the “Your Sets” and “Your Groups” tabs in that area, they will add a Maps tab where you can drag photos into a Yahoo Map area. A marker will appear that shows the number of photos included with that marker. Once you have a location you can use the Organizr to search your photos and then drag them individually or by sets into the map.

Splendid, I say. It even automatically adds your geotagged photos for you.

Thanks, Flickr.

Recently Julie asked how to geotag her photos. Julie does a lot of travelling and she wants her photos to show where they were taken. I used to use GeoBloggers’ excellent solution but the developer got hired by Yahoo! so things slowed a little when he closed the site. Now the plot thickens and it looks like

Flickr are developing drag ‘n’ drop geotagging, as reported by TechCrunch.Zooomr does it already, not bad for a new kid on the block. I’m just starting to play with Zooomr and it looks good so far.Now, geotagging on Flickr isn’t hard in the first place - just add the tags for the photo as geo:latxx.xxxxxx and geo:lonyy.yyyyyy. Now the photo knows where it was taken. (While you’re at it, you might want to add a tag called “geotagged” so you can easily find it later).Once you’ve added geographical information to your photo as to where you took it, the photo itself becomes a lot more useful as a record of where you’ve been. (Actually, I find it faintly embarrassing for people to know that I travel so little, but if you like travel photos then Julie’s blog is the place to go). It’s adding that geo info that’s the trick. You can use various tools to place your photos on a map by dragging - I use the most excellent GMiF Flickr add-in which has loads of useful features, but there are other tools - and tell it to add the tags to the pic. (Or you can wait for the Yahoo!/Flickr drag ‘n’ drop feature to go live). Or you can use the co-ords from your GPS if you have one.Once you’ve geotagged the pics you can use FlickrFly or GMiF or whatever to get Google Earth to fly to your pic on the globe, which is REALLY cool. AND you can create a photoset to generate a photo-tour (the latest version of Google Earth Plus allows you to upload tracks from your GPS. More of this in a later post).

Trouble is, you might think you need your photos in a Flickr account to be able to geotag them.
But No. Read on…

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