Flickr Adds Places, Redesigns Map Explorer

Flickr, which previously offered users the ability to search for photos by location or see photos clustered and arrayed on a map, is going further down this path. The company is revamping Flickr’s map explorer and introducing a new service called “Places.” Places are pages dedicated to, well, specific places featuring maps and other information such as Flickr groups and weather, in addition to Flickr photos. Places pages will be effectively built by members through tagging.

The new map explorer will apparently also feature tags that open a film strip/photo stream of an event or specific location. Here’s a screenshot from the Yahoo Yodel Anecdotal blog:

Places represents an alternative way to organize and present the now more than two billion photos on the site. And it starts to take Flickr down a very interesting evolutionary path. Yahoo has only begun to fully leverage Flickr across its many properties. Travel, search, and Yahoo Local are just some obvious examples where Flickr could add a great deal of additional value. The company earlier this year integrated Flickr into Yahoo Image Search.

The new pages on Flickr don’t appear to be live yet. But here’s more detail from Yodel Anecdotal with some additional screenshots. O’Reilly Radar also has some screenshots.

Postscript: Flickr Places went up this past Wednesday. Here are examples for New York, London, Paris, Moscow.