Flickr Place IDs
January 18th, 2008Geocoding is hard work, figuring out where exactly on this wobbly sphere a given humanly vague string might be referring to is just crazy.
Turns out there are a bunch of interesting things you can do without knowing a lot of detailed latitude, longitude stuff but instead just having an agreement that when I say “San Francisco”, and you say “San Francisco”, we’re talking about the one in California, and not somewhere else.
On Flickr we call these things “places”. (creative?) And as I mentioned on the Flickr API mailing list last week and in my early places blog post, places have “place ids”.
This post is just a quick note to the effect that as of this afternoon on top of getting place_ids back with flickr.photos.getInfo, and being able to round trip a place_id with the flickr.places.resolvePlaceURL and flickr.places.resolvePlaceID you can now do a free form search for places with the new flickr.places.find.
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