Flickr to map the world's latest photo hotspots

By Eric Auchard

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Picture having an Olympian view of millions of photos the world's photographers and cameraphone users have produced over the last day.

That's what Flickr, Yahoo Inc's online photo-sharing site, said on Sunday the company plans to offer this week, by introducing a set of mapping features that makes it easier to find photos based on their location.

Starting on Monday, Flickr will unveil a way for Web users to browse photos from tens of millions of geographically located photos loaded up to its site, www.flickr.com/.

The service, called "Places," identifies on a global map the latest hot-spots for photo contributions.

"It's a new way to browse what is happening in the world," said Kakul Srivastava, senior director of product management at Flickr.

Flickr Places also allows users to search by more than 100,000 geographic place names to find photos that might interest them. Many of the world's cities as well as states, countries and regions have their own featured pages.

The global map view lets Flickr users see the latest photos by theme. Clicking on a category tag will take them to a selection of photos, giving them a glimpse of what other Flickr users collectively find interesting or newsworthy.

Flickr counts more than 40 million monthly visitors and 2 billion photos stored on the 3-1/2-year-old site. Between 2.5 million and 3 million new photos are uploaded every day, with a growing percentage categorized by users according to location.