Flickr Debuts Location-Based Places Pages for Exploring Photos
Next time you visit Flickr, you can virtually travel to different cities in the world by viewing the best photos from that place all on one page.
Previously, the photo sharing site just offered a map of the world you could zoom in on to see clusters of photos taken in any particular place. Today’s launch introduces place-specific pages for each location where Flickr users are snapping heavily.
The new feature is called Places Pages. Choose Reykjavik, Iceland, for example. Its places page shows the most interesting photos taken recently in Reykjavik, along with the most relevant tags and groups for that chilly corner of the globe. You’ll also see the most popular photographers (picked based on the "interestingness" of their photos — Flickr’s secret sauce) and other data about the city like weather and a local map.
We took an in-depth look at Flickr’s new Places Pages feature when the photo sharing site first showed it off at October’s Web 2.0 Summit conference. Places Pages went live on the site mid-day Tuesday. The Flickr team was due to release the update on Monday, but some last-minute snags pushed the release back one day.
All of the mapping stuff is provided by Yahoo, Flickr’s parent company. If you’ve ever spent time browsing Flickr’s world map, cool as it was, you’ll know it didn’t do a whole lot. Places Pages clearly provides significant enhancements to the way Flickr users can browse the site’s cache of place-specific photos. Currently, 50 million of Flickr’s 2 billion photos are geotagged with place-specific data. Around 32 million of those geotagged photos are public.
