Thursday, December 11, 2008

Flickr Geographic

Once edited, I post most of my photos on Flickr, though I can't say I have much to do with the Flickr "community." Perhaps I've even managed to anger a person or two with my non participation- most of my free time consumed by the break neck comings and goings here at R-F. Sorry...

That said, I did manage to steal a precious holiday moment or two imbibing in some analogue geotagging of said photos on the Flickr Map service. The fun part is that you can place your photo on the exact street or location almost anywhere in the world. Of course, if like me, you can't remember the exact location where you took your precious prize winners twenty some years ago, you may (like me) just dump them all on one corner of said town, borough or arrondissement- as I did my Mardi Gras photos on Bourbon St.

What can be truly maddening and perplexing however, is that Flickr, for some utterly inexplicable reason, has seen fit to remove many of the names of the most obvious and pertinent tourist hot spots and places of note from their regular map, and their hybrid map is one crowded mumbo jumbo of satellite imagery combined with street names, etc. The satellite imagery is cool, no doubt- but having to Google up yet another map just to locate the exact location you're looking for is definitely not. You'd think Flickr could have just placed a small square on the map where the Tomb of The Unknown Soldier is at Arlington National Cemetery- as in any other tourist map. And don't expect to find said cemetery, or other famous destinations by typing in their names- cities and streets only, please...

Finally, be advised that the Flickr map only highlights the blips on the map that correspond with the photos shown directly below said map- scroll through your photos, and the corresponding map blips will change respectively.

2 comments:

mark page said...

cheers for the link our kid......

Stan B. said...

No worries...