Photo sharing website Flickr has today launched a new mapping service that allows users to search for pictures on the basis of their location and access related information.The Yahoo!-owned website currently hosts billions of photos and receives around 40 million visits every month, and this latest feature offers a new way for users - particularly travellers - to look for relevant images, Reuters reports.
Flickr Places uses an existing map facility to identify photos based on the location in which they were taken, with over 100,000 searchable hotspots being made available and new features such as "hot tags" and photo streams now on display on the map's main page.
Accessible in eight languages in total - English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Korean and traditional Chinese - Flickr Places also includes special pages for certain destinations, containing information such as local weather data and maps.
"It's a new way to browse what is happening in the world," Kakul Srivastava, senior director of product management at Flickr, told Reuters.
The website saw its two billionth image - a photo of a gum tree in Australia - uploaded last week.
CNET News.com recently reported that Microsoft is set to build its own photo-sharing website after posting an advert for the role of project manager for "a next-generation photo and video-sharing service that will compete with Flickr, SmugMug and other photo web solutions".
