Pardon this wholly self-referential post, but I took some photos during my vacation in Ethiopia, and I couldn’t pass by the opportunity to put them on a map. It’s remarkable how much of Ethiopia is in sub-meter resolution in Google Earth — it makes manual georeferencing a pleasure, and even more accurate than GPS. check out the KML file attached to the larger map:

View Larger Map

I used Adam Franco’s excellent Flickr Photo Set to KML tool to make this map.

Some notes: Google’s Panoramio is fantastic, but I use Flickr to store and share my photos online. Much as I’d love to add my photos to Google Earth’s default layer, I’m not going to double my efforts by uploading and geotagging them again to Panoramio. That’s just inefficient.

The solution is obvious from a end-user perspective, but perhaps not so obvious from the perspective of two competitors — Google and Yahoo. I’d like to be able to tell Flickr (owned by Yahoo) that one, some or all photos of mine that I’ve geotagged may be depicted in a Google Earth base layer, just by ticking a check box.

That way, Flickr wins by offering an added service to its users (in addition to the in-house social mapping goodness, which nevertheless is thin on non-US high-resolution satellite imaging data), while Google gets to show more photos on Google Earth. And I get to avoid duplicating the effort involved in georeferencing my photos when I upload them. (I used FlickrExport for Aperture.) It would be a win-win-win situation for all involved, no?

PS: The above argument counts for other photo sharing sites with geotagging abilities too, of course.