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Flickr Place IDs: Coming Soon to a Mashup Near You

By Scott Gilbertson January 22, 2008 Categories: Multimedia, Platforms & APIs, Programming

flickr.jpgFlickr has added some aspects of its recently launched Places service, which allows users to browse photos by location, to the Flickr API. Although Flickr is careful to note that the new flickr.places.find API method is not a true geocoding service, it almost functions like one and should enable some interesting location-based mashups.

Given a place name, like “San Francisco,” the Flickr API will return an id and url which you can then use to pull in other nearby photos. The Places API call will be welcome news for developers of travel sites or other location aware services since the API provides an easy way for users to see all the Flickr images from a given area without leaving the site.

Regrettably the API won’t resolve actual latitude/longitude coordinates (hence the “this is not a geocoder warning”), but since the getInfo() method for retrieving photos from Flickr now contains a place_id, it shouldn’t be to hard to put together some very cool things with the new Places API tool.

If you’re looking for a true geocoder for use in your mashup or elsewhere have a look at our coverage of Urban Mappings recent announcement or check out Geonames.org which also has a nice API available.

[via Waxy]

See Also:

Tags: Mash-up
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