Geotagging Flickr photos has proven to be a hugely popular pursuit, with over 100,000 images tagged to date. You can display geotagged photos in Google Earth using the most excellent Geobloggers site’s network link (temporarily down for renovations and boy do we miss it), and there are several ways of easing the geotagging task: Marrying GPS data with a digital camera’s EXIF data, Steeev’s script for using Google Earth (apparently broken by the latest version of Greasemonkey), standalone Windows application ITag, and .CK’s GMIF script for using Google Maps. (More info and links at the GeoTagging Flickr group page.)

Now, New Zealander Mark Zeman has taken the geotagging concept to a whole new level with Flickrmap, a properly ajaxified web application that does several things: It lets you show your geotagged Flickr photos on a map on your own website or blog, it lets you use Google Earth to geotag your photos, and it acts as a geotagging “manager” for your Flickr photos.

The integration with Google Earth is seamless and impressive, but I think the cleverest (and genuinely innovative) feature in Flickrmap is that it will automatically convert placename tags into geotags. For example, if you have a photo that is tagged “Paris France”, Flickrmap will suggest the correct geotags for you to add. You can then use Google Earth to pinpoint the location, but you don’t have to if you don’t want to — your Flickrmap map will already locate that picture in Paris.

Mark explains it far better in a multimedia tutorial. Worth watching, even if you don’t geotag photos, just to see what you can do with Google Earth, Flickr, and a healthy dose of ajax.

[Update 2006-01-07: As Ole points out in the comments, Flickrmap is not the only geo-spatial solution for photos. His post has a long list.]