Tech Shout!

Flickr, the Yahoo-owned photo-sharing site has spoken about plans to offer a new feature called Flickr Places that will offer users an ‘Olympian’ view of the millions of photos uploaded location-wise by photographers and camera phone users alike.

This set of mapping features called Flickr Places is reportedly expected to be rolled out today. This service identifies the latest hotspots for photo contributions on a global map.

Flickr Places also enables users to search according to geographic locations, allowing them to find photos that might interest them. In fact, many of the world’s cities, states, countries and regions have their own featured pages.

The new Places pages will also include useful local information like regional maps, weather and current time.

According to Kakul Srivastava, senior director of product management at Flickr, “It’s a new ay to browse what is happening in the world.”

Flickr is adding 3,000 to 5,000 new location pages per week, added Srivastava.

Since this new feature offers a global map view, it also lets Flickr users see the latest uploaded photos by theme. Clicking on a category tag will take the user to a selection of photos, giving them a glimpse of what other Flickr users collectively find interesting.

In recent times, Flickr has been introduced in many regional languages. This is yet another effort on the part of Flickr to give its site more a much more local appeal, as well as to attract prospective travelers who are looking to go beyond just photos of the usual landmarks for places they plan to visit.

Flickr Places will be available in the eight languages that are currently offered by Flickr namely English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Korean and Traditional Chinese.