Find your Photos

Alright, this one is cool enough that I have to add my own comment to the blogosphere. Flickr, the online photo service that I and most of the free world use to share pictures, has added a cool new feature. As noted on the Flickr Blog, you can now use Yahoo maps (Yahoo bought Flickr several months ago) to tag your photos with location data and display them on a map. I've tagged a few of the pictures I took on our vacation in July and you can see my map here:

My Flickr Map

Other applications have made this possible in much more roundabout methods, but this integrated solution that combines Yahoo's Mapping capabilities directly with Flickr is a big step. Some are complaining that Google Maps are better, which is true. But, Yahoo is never, ever, going to use the mapping API from their arch rival and this move is also going to drive Yahoo to improve their Mapping side as well.

What's also cool is that, if your pictures already have the location info in them (and there are ways to do this) you can have Flickr automatically read that and add it to your map directly.

I've been hearing about this and I'm pretty excited that it's finally here.

Now, a word of caution - be careful what pictures you tag and what locations you tag. So far, I'm only tagging pictures taken away from the house. I know where my house is and what pictures I've taken there, the world doesn't need to see that on a map.

So, start tagging those pictures and start remembering where you took them.