If you love maps and GPS coordinates as much as I do, you’ll find Flickr Maps irresistible.  I’ve become an avid user in the month or so that the feature has been available, and you can find many of my sets (especially those that are outdoors) sporting location information.  You can see a map of all my geotagged photos here.

First some history.  Flickr runs on "tags", or keywords that users give their photos.  These tags are vital for searching and grouping photos.  Flickr has some pretty advanced facilities for tagging, including third-party tagging (a user tagging someone else’s photo), and tagging just a part of a photo.  For a while a growing set of Flickr users have added latitude and longitude tags to their photos, and developed some mash-ups for displaying their photos on maps.  Now Flickr has built this capability in, with geospatial metadata given the same status as time, licensing, and viewing permissions.

Here’s a zoomed in view of part of my map with satellite imagery turned on.

Each geotagged photo shows up as a dot on the map.  Click on a dot and you get a series of thumbnails of photos shot in that location.  Click on Show detail and you get a larger view of the photos.

So, why is this cool?

First, for those of us addicted to photosets as a way to view photos in order (generally chronological) in order to tell a "story" documenting some event, the order that you view photos in makes a big difference.  And a map presents an interesting order in which to view your photos.  For instance, the dots imply that our circumnavigation of Echo Lake was part water and part on land.

Second, if you’re addicted to satellite imagery, you probably have found that while an overhead view gives you some sense of a place, when you actually go there you find that it can be quite different from your expectation.  The ability to see some photos helps build a much better sense of what it would be like to be there.  And you’ll find new places you want to see - like Desolation Valley’s Twin Lakes as captured by malaparte, which I found while reviewing my Echo Lake geotags.

Third, for the historical addict, grouping photos by location, and not by time taken, can give you a sense of how a place changes at different times of day or night, or even different seasons.  Eventually I might be able to look back and see what a place was like a decade ago…  This is especially valuable as the collective historical record grows.  Click "Clear all" and the dots won’t be limited to just your photos, but will mix in photos from everyone.

If you’re a photoset addict, a satellite addict, and a historical addict, you had best resign yourself now to becoming a Flickr maps addict.

But what was unexpected to me is that the act of geotagging, rather than the chore I expected, is rewarding in and of itself thanks to the Flickr map/Yahoo map user interface.  To walk through a set of photographs, and map them up either through GPS logs, or just manually placing them on the map from memory (which is surprisingly easy even for photos a year or more old), is like a trip down memory lane.  You have to remember where you were when you took each photo in order to place it on the map.  You correlate your experiences with the satellite imagery.  You look more closely at the dates and times the photos were taken, and the relation of different photos in time and in space.  You compare your photos with ones others have taken at the same spot.

In the end, it’s like reacquainting yourself with old friends.