Using Flickr to find inspiring locations

Sometime ago Flickr added Places to their site. Places collects together photos about a particular place, popular tags, groups and photographers. It's a great starting for finding interesting locations to photograph.

You can search for locations using the search box in the top-right. Currently, only larger cities and towns have Place pages so this method is probably best for scouting out urban locations. It's probably most useful for those business trips to new cities. Planning a trip business trip to Sydney, Australia? Pop over to the Flickr Place page and check out some of the photos or groups. If you click on the map image you'll be taken to a map view with the photos plotted where they were taken:


You can use the map to check out the best viewpoints of the Harbour Bridge or Sydney Opera House, or look further afield for other interesting places.

Taking a holiday in Ireland? Here's the Place page for Kinsale, Ireland:

and the map page:


So what's wrong with Flickr Places?
The maps are limited by the number of photos that have been geotagged and the pages themselves are restricted to just major towns and cities. It also seems as if searching is the primary means of navigating the site: You can't browse a list of countries, then drill-down the list into counties, cities etc, which feels quite limiting.

Some Places have basic weather data and the local time but there's not enough information to help you plan your photoshoot. There's no weather data for the coming week or anything like that.

But the real restriction is that the Places are pulled together automatically with no ability for users to write descriptions or tips. Although you might be able to find an interesting photo there's no information on the nearest car park or access roads or any other information that photographers might share.

If you want to find stunning landscape locations then Flickr might not be the best tool for the job.

How will Shutter Scouts differ?
Ultimately, Shutter Scouts is about about sharing photographic locations instead of just sharing geotagged photos. The emphasis is on the location not the individual photos.

We can pull in geotagged photos from Flickr but augment that with proper weather data, sunset/sunrise data and descriptions by photographers about the appropriate time-of-the-day to visit or access restrictions. Hopefully that will create a far more useful resource for photographers. And even if no one contributes descriptions, it won't be any less useful then Flickr.