Flickr adds new photo tool flexibility with ‘Places’

Yahoo’s popular photo-sharing service Flickr has this week revealed a new and useful mapping feature called Places, which will enable users to locate photographic imagery through the expansive Web site by selecting specific related locations, reports Reuters. Yahoo-owned Flickr introduces Places, a new geographical tool that highlights popular images via their location. Credit: Flickr.

Yahoo-owned Flickr introduces Places, a new geographical tool that highlights popular images via their location. Credit: Flickr. "It's a new way to browse what is happening in the world," enthused Kakul Srivastava, Flickr’s senior director of product management, regarding the new service, which started yesterday and utilises a world map to show exactly where the day’s newest influx of photo submissions have come from.Other features connected to the Places service include the ability to apply image searches to more than 100,000 places of interest around the world; and, further to that, numerous cities, states, countries and regions of note are also included and boast their own specific pages. Srivastava has also outlined that around 3,000 to 5,000 locations will be added to the Places map every week to help widen the site’s user appeal yet further. Flickr’s global map also allows users to peruse the site’s latest image arrivals on a popularity and theme basis, offering up category tags on the map which then present a variety of applicable images representing exactly what Flickr users are targeting as interesting at that current time.The service also delivers a degree of local information related to its 100,000 on-site locations, such as regional maps, weather conditions, and current time, Places arrives offering eight user languages, which are Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish. Yahoo-owned Flickr attracts some 40 million visitors each month and has amassed approximately 2 billion images on its pages since it launched online in February of 2004. The arrival of Places is possibly a result of as many as 3 million images being uploaded each day, with an increasing number of those images being categorised by their specific geographical location.