Three Hidden(ish) Flickr Map Features

Posted on October 31, 2006 by Reverend Dan Catt

Being mainly; placenames in the URL, microformats and geoRSS, and by ‘Hidden’ I mean ‘less known about or obvious’.

http://www.flickr.com/map/[some place name]

I’m pretty sure this is undocumented anywhere, well other than here now. You can fire up Flickr maps focused on places by putting the placename in the URL. This works best with cities, but can work with countries and addresses too.

http://www.flickr.com/map/cyprus
http://www.flickr.com/map/san+francisco
http://www.flickr.com/map/94089
http://www.flickr.com/map/WC2H+8AD?map_type=sat

Flickr gives a best shot at figuring out what’s what and starts there. Doesn’t always work, but handy for sending someone a map link.

Microformats

It’s been known for a while that we support geo microformats. But, viewing the source of this photo…

http://www.flickr.com/photos/fprades/283421388/

…gives us not only this microformat hidden away…

<span class=’geo’ style=’display:none’>
<span class=’latitude’>51.50356</span>
<span class=’longitude’>-0.119476</span>
</span>

…for use by whatever nefarious microformat bots get released over them. But also…

<meta name=”ICBM” content=”51.50356, -0.119476″>
<meta name=”geo.position” content=”51.50356; -0.119476″>

ICMB for old skool goodness and geo.positions as a good start on the geotags format. Another couple of tags geo.placename and geo.region will probably roll out soonish, once a couple of kinks are worked out. PhotoRSS has a little more on HTML Geo-Encodings.

Making the currently 6.5 million geo-located photos spider-able, or whatever it is those microformat wonks do. Just to reiterate 6.5 millions, that’s an awful lot of data.

geoRSS

Not that widely known but we also do geoRSS, you just need to add &georss=1 onto the end any rss feed to turn it geoRSS. Here’s an example feed with geoRSS in, where you can see the extra information…

<georss:point>53.014679 -2.187738</georss:point>

At the moment, unless you’re being smart with your tags, most of the current rss feeds won’t always have photos with geo data in. What we really need are rss feeds that get back purely geo located photos. Geobloggers used to have geoRSS feeds you could subscribe too and we’re just starting on the second stage of Flickr maps, and I’m a big fan of geoRSS, so hopefully this’ll feature will be more widely known for good reason in the future.

Perhaps I should take feature requests for geoRSS?

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

Filed under: flickr, maps

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8 Responses to “Three Hidden(ish) Flickr Map Features”

  1. Aerial Maps » Have you ever seen an aerial photo?, on October 31st, 2006 at 11:40 pm Said:

    [...] Three Hidden(ish) Flickr Map FeaturesThree Hidden(ish) Flickr Map Features October 31st, 2006 Being mainly; placenames in the URL, microformats and geoRSS, and by Hidden I mean less… [...]

  2. Andrew Turner, on November 1st, 2006 at 6:55 pm Said:

    Glad you’re making the “less known” features less-”less known” - they’re really great features.

    As for the getting a feed of *just* Geo photos, using the triple-tagging idea, you can just get a feed where the tag is “geotagged”.

    http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=51648834@N00&tags=geotagged&format=rss_200&georss=1

    So then you can use something like OpenLayers to quickly embed your own map of Flickr-Geo photos into your blog.

    Like:
    http://location.highearthorbit.com/travel/olmap.html

    then put it in your sidebar: http://highearthorbit.com

  3. High Earth Orbit » Blog Archive » Dan Catt on Flickr Map features, on November 1st, 2006 at 8:22 pm Said:

    [...] Dan Catt (of Geobloggers fame - now at Yahoo) talks about 3 hidden (less known) features of Flickr Maps. [...]

  4. Administrator, on November 3rd, 2006 at 5:59 pm Said:

    Hi Andrew,

    We’re just wrapping up all the loose ends of stage 1 of mapping. GeoRSS feeds in all the places you’d want them, is slated to be a stage 2 feature, to be started soon.

    You’ll be able to get just your Geo photos (or photos for a location) without all the tagging. When that’s in we’ll really be pushing on the GeoRSS and hope to see GeoRSS aggregators popping up to do all sorts of different tasks.

  5. Blog Mann » Yahoo! Research releases TagMaps/WorldExplorer, with GeoRSS I/O, on April 26th, 2007 at 2:02 pm Said:

    [...] Yahoo! Research Berkeley is datamining the 10 million+ geotagged flickr photos (all available in GeoRSS btw), and particularly deriving meaning from the association of geotags and folksonomic tags. Particular words become associated with particular places, and that’s interesting and potentially useful. Yahoo explains it better. [...]

  6. Mark Nutter, on April 26th, 2007 at 8:15 pm Said:

    Here’s a quick and dirty guide I wrote on how to get the flickr map embedded in a blog or website.

  7. Web tool: visualize on Google Maps | blog.forret.com, on July 5th, 2007 at 8:58 am Said:

    [...] Copy/paste the KML feed URL. Example 1: the KML link from Google Maps: Example 2: Flickr feeds also have a Flickr GeoRSS format which is compatible (now also KML). [...]

  8. Auto Inkoop, on November 20th, 2008 at 12:59 am Said:

    Does anybody know how to integrate geoRSS with http://www.flickr.com/map/amsterdam?

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