This afternoon I found the time to try Flickr’s new geo API services. Well, the only thing I did was to add a 600x600m bbox around each underground station point to the existing text search string on my little test site.
Some notes on that:
Flickr doesn’t use the bbox as an additional “OR” filter condition but takes the bbox as an “AND” argument into account, meaning that Flickr searches solely within the bbox for the text search string. With little success, since the majority of photos isn’t geotagged the Flickr search returns only a few results (compared to the text search). Correct me if I’m wrong, but that’s what I observed.
I expected the location tag to count as bonus point in the “relevance” ranking if the place name of the photo matches the search string or the photo lies within the bbox.
As a workaround to see more results I’m checking if it makes sense to do a location search around my station. If necessary I strip the bbox condition out of my search arguments and switch to the traditional text search.
Including the location argument is not as straightforward as I thought. It’s easy to implement of course, but the results are not very satisfying.
Anyhow, I’m confident that the results will improve soon since more and more people are starting to geotag their photos on Flickr.
One problem in my region is that one cannot geotag photos based on Yahoo! maps, they’re still to coarse. Loc.alize.us is the better option to get that job done here.
Sometimes I wasn’t getting any search result based on the bbox, strange, maybe there was something wrong at the Flickr servers because loc.alize.us wasn’t displaying any photo either. I’ll keep an eye on that…