Congratulations to the Flickr team for their new geotagging interface. I think this is the first time it's truly easy for normal people to indicate where they took their photographs in a way others can benefit from.

It's a bit late for a pony request, but I sure wish geocoding interfaces had a notion of uncertainty along with location. Ie: latitude, longitude, and radius. A photo geocoded to "San Francisco, CA" is different from a photo geocoded to "659 Merchant St. San Francisco, CA". The former has a radius of about four miles. The latter, 20 feet.

Tagging your photos via a map interface gives a natural radius: a few pixels' width in the map the user clicked on. GPS devices have a natural uncertainy measurement, too. So the data's available, why not store it?

Update: A Flickr developer wrote to tell me that their geotagging does store and use accuracy data. If you ask for photos in a precise location you don't see photos that are too general. Cool! Looks like its in the API too.
Thanks to pb for the term fuzzy geocoding
techphoto
  2006-08-29 15:33 Z