Photo sharing site Flickr is beginning to leverage its milions-deep collection of geotagged photos submitted by users, unveiling a new feature called Places. Places will not only enable site visitors to search for photos based on place names, but also enable them to locate Flickr photos using a zoom-able global map. Users can browse photos geographically, peek at local “hot spots” of Flickr contributions, and search by more than 100,000 place names to find images of interesting places. Images can also be organized by theme. Flickr says it will be adding three to five thousand new “Places” each week, collecting together regional information like weather and maps.
Flickr’s existing Map service will also get an upgrade, featuring “hot tags” which will bring up a browsable “photo ribbon” of images associated with a particular location.
Flickr recently celebrated the 2 billionth image being uploaded to its service. Users upload some 2.5 to 3 million new photos a day, with a significant percentage of them tagged by users to identify the image’s location.
Flickr Places should go live this week, with launch scheduled to cover eight languages: English, Frnech, Spanish, traditional Chinese, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Korean.
