Today Flickr added the ability to geo-tag photos via the flash-based organizr tool. This is a great addition and one of the big features I really liked about zooomr.
Basically, within organizr you drag and drop photos onto an embedded Yahoo Maps screen. You then have the ability to further edit tags, tweak security and location information. The first time you use the map function you are asked to set a default view permission for photos that you geo-tag (this can be overridden on an individual picture or batch setting).
It’s no surprise that Flickr is using Yahoo Maps for this function (instead of the vastly superior Google Maps), the huge downside of this is that there is little or no street level information available in Europe and Asia — even trying to switch to the satellite view doesn’t help much as you frequently get a blank screen if you are at a low enough altitude. This made trying to geo-tag some of my recent vacation photos from Spain basically impossible.
You can use the Explore -> Photos on a map drop down to see what other photos have been added to a given map. You can search for a location by name or just by dragging around on the map. I was surprised to see that another photographer in my area had uploaded/tagged close to 50 photos already.
I have gotten one error in Organizr trying to use this function — it looked like the database was not available. The text of the error message was hard to make out as it was written over my photostream in a light gray font. Hitting the refresh button appeared to make everything right again.
It will be interesting to see how this evolves over time.
technorati tags: yahoomaps, flickr, photography, geotag, maps