Photo Mapping

There's a lot of photo sharing websites out there Kodak's picture gallery (great for ordering prints), Google's Picasa, Photobucket, Snapfish etc. etc. Me, I'm a Flickr gal through and through. I love the sets, the tags, the groups, the easy ways to share and comment, the fact the Flickr team keeps trying to make things better. Over the past few years, I've gotten a few nice comments, requests to add photos to a group, an e-mail asking about a trip I took, a link to my photo on a blog, and even an authorized publication in a magazine. Sure all that stuff's fun, the groups are full of interesting photos, the contacts feature lets me keep up with what my friends are into, the stats give me an idea of what photos people are looking at every day. I've learned a lot too, by looking at other people's photos. But nothing, nothing compares to the barrel of fun that is Flickr maps!

Combining two of my favorite things digital photography and maps, the Flickr Map application is easy use and probably my favorite way yet of organizing photos. It's as simple as looking at your photo, clicking on map, putting in an approximate address then zooming the map to where you want and dragging your photo to wherever you want it. You can put it out in the wilderness, a precise intersection, the middle of San Francisco Bay, wherever you think it belongs. The map will also show other people's photos in that area. It's always interesting to me where people put there photos. I try to be pretty precise for the most part but I realize the utility of sometimes just grouping a bunch of nearby photos all in one spot. For example for my kayak trip to Mexico last spring I put all the kayaking photos in one bay of the island though we kayaked along the shore for four days. A friend of mine split his into two spots on the island.

It's taken me not long at all to put a large number of my pictures onto the map. I'm still working on my England trip since I have to do some serious thinking about exactly where some of them were taken. In general most of my pictures are taken in California, New York or the couple of places I've been on vacation recently so it's no too hard. Then it's easy for me to look at all the pictures of New York over the last couple of years, or look at the map of California and remember all the nice places I've been lately. But more than the utility of Flickr maps it's just darn fun!