iMapFlickr – Nifty Flickr Map Visualizer

January 7, 2008 0 By Tad Reeves

Seeing as I’m a borderline-obsessive geotagger and geotag every last photo I put up on Flickr, I’m still trawling the net looking for the perfect way to visualize it all.   Still haven’t found it, but did find something cool.  This is a tool called iMapFlickr – a tool that lets you visualize your FLickr sets on a Google Maps based app, and then hosts such in a way you can iframe them into your site, or short-link them in a Twitter post. 

As an example, here’s a visualization of my Baby 365 Project set on Flickr:

It’s nice, in that you get a pretty decent visualization of all of the places I’ve taken my daughter, in one map frame.  There are a limit of how many dots it’ll show on the screen at one go, but at least it’s not missing any major ones.  The plus on this over flickr’s built-in mapper is that (a) you can embed it, and (b) more importantly it will actually plot the whole set, rather than just the items in the thumbnails.  Flickr’s built-in mapper will only show about 20-30 data points on the map AT MOST, and this looks like it’s getting a good deal more. 

What I’d like to make it cooler – and what prevents it from being my perfect map visualizer:

  • Icons:  Unfortunately, with shadowed icons like this, it creates a funky map artifact in DC where I have about 100 photos all clustered around one spot.  It’d be better to have real small icons that would make clusters of close datapoints easier to visualize.
  • Not just sets: I’m still looking for a tool that’ll visualize EVERYTHING I have loaded into Flickr.  I guess I could make an EVERYTHING set and add EVERYTHING to it, but that’s kind of a hack.  I really would like a neat way to just see ALL of my photos on a map. 

Still – a nice tool, and a nifty map that was easy to just paste on here.