A Map? On Flickr? Is that a question?

The people at Flickr have been at it again. Leave it to Flickr to stay on the cutting edge of picture social networking. Flickr has recently introduced Geo Tagging to pictures in Flickr.

Flickr has added a map of the world to their site so you can geotag your very own photos so everybody can see where you took them, or you can just browse around the world and see where other people have been and what they saw.

Geo Tagging, as Wikipedia puts it, is "the process of adding geographical identification metadata to various media such as websites, RSS feeds, or images. This data usually consists of latitude and longitude coordinates, though it can also include altitude and place names." In English this means that Pictures can now be tagged with locations

Well, in very basic terms Flickr is probably the ultimate photo sharing site on the Internet. Flickr is a great way to store, sort, search and share your photos online. There is a huge mass of photos in the world, and Flickr provides a way to organise them for you and your friends and family to tell your stories about them, how they came to be and what they mean.

Whilst it is certainly not the only photo service on the 'Net - the difference is that Flickr is built around communities. What's that mean? It means you can upload your photos to your own albums and then share them in other groups or maybe with friends or family - even at work.

If you're someone who has an overwhelming desire to keep a web-log of those moments captured on your camera-phone, or perhaps you need to securely and privately share photos of the kids with all the relatives across the country then Flickr makes all these things possible plus more. Maybe you just want to show off your best pictures to the whole world in a bid for web celebrity.

Further, yes, there is a free version of Flickr. It does have a few limitations compared to the paid subscription mode, but it's still pretty good value. There is the option of upgrading to a Flickr Pro

Because it's essentially hard to search a picture in word terms, because after all they are pictures, not words, Flickr has another great feature; it also allows you to add tags to your photos that can be searched on. For example if I wanted to see pictures of Dubbo I would do something like this. http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/dubbo/.

Tags are like keywords or labels that you can add to a photo, graphic or picture to make it easier to find later. You can tag a photo with tags like "Janice camping in the outback wilderness" and then later on if you are looking for pictures of Janice you can just click on that tag and get all photos that have had that tag allocated to them.

You may also have the right to add tags to some of your friends' photos, because the ability to add tags is one of the things which you can allow access to in the privacy settings for your photos.

There are some excellent write-ups on tagging on the site - try: Tagging it up - some suggestions for tagging your images, and Tagography - case studies.

Pretty much, essentially, Geotagging is a method of adding location information to objects on the Internet, in this case, photos. You geotag your photos in Flickr by using their Organizer feature. All you need do is drag and drop your photos on to the map where you took them.

Some folks might remember Google Earth and Yahoo! Maps Web Services. The map concept is built exactly around these concepts.

There are also a few geotag-related groups on Flickr, like GeoTagging Flickr that you can take a look at to see what people are doing with all this location information.

It's actually incredibly easy. Effectively all you have to do is click your mouse on the photo, or for that matter, batches of photos, and "drag" them over the spot on a map where you took your pictures - that's about it.

Of course, for those of us too lazy to geocode our photos on Flickr, or simply can't remember where we were when the photo was taken, a solution is not far away. GPS enabled cameras can geo-stamp photos for you, and Flickr will be able to read this information and properly place your photos without any additional work on your part.

If you want step by step instructions - you start by watching their online screencast of Geotags & You: How to add your photos to a map using Organizr.

But, if you'd rather just read how to do it... Open up their Organizr, and find the photo(s) you'd like to place on the map and Click on the "Map" tab. Then, you can either jump straight to a location by using the "Find Location" feature or use the pan/zoom tools to browse to the place where you took your photo(s).

Yes it is apparently quite private. You can just keep exactly where you took your photos private if you wish, or perhaps better - assign permission to any level you're comfortable with. You can set default privacy levels for those photos you add to the map; you can even change the location privacy per photo as well.

Remember that the photo's overall privacy setting will override geoprivacy. For example, if you make a photo available to friends only, only people whom you would like to be able to access the shot will be able to see the photo in the first place. If you're still concerned you can add a secondary level of privacy around where the photo was taken,

Yes, you can. All you need have to do is grab the photo you want to remove from the map, and drag it back into the Finder. This won't actually delete the photo, but rather, will just remove the location information.

Arthur Hissey
Computer Research & Technology
www.crt.net.au