Mapping my photos the Flickr way

Yahoo’s purchase of Flickr, the excellent photo hosting/community site, is starting to generate some interesting things. Finally. Flickr’s been integrated with Yahoo Maps to allow you to “geotag” your photos – add information about where the pic was taken to the photo itself, and then display the results on a map. You can see mine here.

A colleague and I have been playing around with it today (you can see his thoughts on Flickr Maps on the Travolution Blog), and have come to the same conclusion: the quality of the maps outside the US sucks really, really badly. Happily, though, Flickr is aware of the issue:

There’s been a lot of grumbling about the maps detail and coverage of Yahoo! maps outside the U.S. We definitely hear it, and the Yahoo! Local/Maps team, which happens to sit across from the Flickr team hears it (and feels it!) … loud and clear. The maps in much of the world are not good enough yet. We agree.

But, fear not: maps are continually being upgraded and street-level detail for more countries has been in the works for a while already. Satellite imagery upgrades already happen a couple of times each month (the Earth is big, y’know) and in the months since the new Maps beta launched, they’ve already made significant improvements. More are coming.

So, with a bit of luck, we’ll see some big improvements in a couple of months. I’ve long felt that map-based information was going to be a big thing going forwards. This might just prove my point for me.