Last week Flickr, the Yahoo owned photo sharing service announced that it now has over 100 million geo tagged photographs in its database. This in relative terms means one in every 30 photographs uploaded on the site is geo tagged. That in turn means Flickr has over 3 billion photographs taking a world tour of its servers. (Flickr said all this on their blog, I just mixed the words)
The geo tagged photographs of couse can be seen on the Flickr Map. While earlier Flickr had left the benefits of these to be taken by third party devs who could use the API and kept the search enabled through geo tagging feature out of the site users, comparitively at least. However, from this week, they have analbed viewing these geotagged images in relation to your own photos with the ‘nearby’ feature. These new ‘nearby’ pages will display a map with images that were taken close to the original photo.
The Flickr guys have explained how ‘nearby ‘ works and its niftiness on their blog -
Nearby starts with a geotagged photo and then queries for other geotagged photos within a one kilometer radius. You can order the results by time and distance and interestingness but the important part is that they are photos, well, nearby to the photo you are looking at. Nearby is a deliberately fuzzy concept. Nearby in St. Peter’s Square in Rome might mean the person directly in front of you. Nearby in the streets of a small town might be the beautiful garden behind the fence and around the corner. Nearby encourages people to poke around and discover their surroundings, as though they were on foot and everything was just a short walk away.
They have also various options to filter searches including who, when and how, which gives third party developers and even photography community enthusiasts a lot of options to make use of. Imagine wanting know the various photographs taken in and around Miami’s beaches at various times of the day. You can arrive at a wonderful bikini analysis for sure with significant time lines to follow while shooting good images there. 
It is good to see innovation happening still at the Yahoo stable. Flickr much like YouTube ..in fact well before that introduced the tenets of social media and its power to the world, it is therefor good to see such updates come from them. Hopefully this feature will also form base to a lot of interesting applications in the coming days.
