Flickr To Debut New Geotag-centric Features In Coming Weeks

What do you think of Flickr? It’s a nice bit of code, eh? It’s got good looks, good feature set, good functionality. It’s a pretty elegant package, wouldn’t you agree?

Well, expect it to get even better real soon, because it’s going to be getting some enhancements to its interface and map utility in the next few weeks. How do I know? They’ll be showing a preview of the new stuff today at O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.

Nearly all of the upgrades expected for public release “in coming weeks” are part-and-parcel of Flickr’s map feature, where the work of all the site’s geotaggers is shared.

Today, using Flickr’s map is a touch too complicated. Needlessly so. Sure, you get to see what people from all over the world have posted, etcetera, etcetera. But it’s not as well-sculpted as many users would like. And it’s not as intuitive as one might expect it to be.

The revamp to come is something many will latch on to if they haven’t already. The map’s been revamped look a heck of a lot more attractive, firstly, and makes the process of finding images from certain locations quickly and efficiently quite simple.

Also, there is to be a new addition to the site’s feature set called Places, which will offer a further-enhanced experience when looking at choice sites around the globe, whether the subject of interest be a city or landmark. Places will provide the user with an easy way to view images made of a particular locale, with photos deemed ‘Interesting’ and otherwise geographically relative quickly found. This may seem like something that shouldn’t be of immense interest to people, but if one were to spend a considerable amount of time with the new feature, one would quickly understand that such an addition is very useful indeed.

For a good amount of time I found little usefulness is this newfangled activity dubbed “geotagging”, but with Flickr now having some 42 million photos with such localized designations (and counting), its now easy to see that the effort made by people to provide the necessary information that makes possible such featureful services as these is no doubt worth it. I’ll certainly begin to do my part for the project from this point forward.

Screenshots:

Flickr's New Map

Flickr Places