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Where In The World Is…

Every now and again I go through phases of trying to geotag all my Flickr photos. There’s something very satisfying about looking at a map of the world and seeing all your pictures on it in the right places, but it is a very time consuming process, and with only about 1,500 of my 6,000ish Flickr photos on the map so far, it’s going to be a while before I get round to doing the lot.

Sadly, Flickr’s technology isn’t quite as helpful as it could be either. What with them being owned by Yahoo and everything (for now at least–I dread to think how bad things will get if Microsoft get their grubby mits on them), you’re stuck with Yahoo’s rubbish maps. Trying to put my photos from our recent Australia trip onto the map using Flickr alone would have been virtually impossible, for example, because Yahoo’s maps of Melbourne don’t really exist (unless you count a grey blob with no distinguishing features as a “map”). Oddly, their satellite pictures are really quite clear, but there’s no street-level mapping at all, even in the CBD. I’ve had to resort to installing this nifty mapping bookmarklet that lets me use Google’s much better maps to put the first photo from a particular location onto the map, and then I can drag the rest onto the same spot in Flickr.

And Flickr is equally confused by my home town. This previously geotagged photo correctly identifies itself as being “taken in Southport, England”, but this one (which I’ve dragged to exactly the same spot at the end of Southport pier at latitude 53.655505 and longitude -3.021492) was apparently “Taken in Banks, England“. A few hundred yards along the pier, closer to the town centre, we’re apparently in Brown Edge, England.

And I think it’ll be news to my parents when I mention to them that their house, despite being clearly visible on the satellite picture is not in Southport after all as we’ve all thought for all these years, but in fact in “Shirdley Hill, England”.

Having said all that, it looks like Google Maps aren’t immune to their own special brand of oddness. Looking at their maps to see where “Shirdley Hill”, “Banks” and “Brown Edge” actually are, I was somewhat surprised to see that there’s a place called Dummy1325 just over to the right of Southport. Must go and take a look next time I’m home.

Dummy1325