New Flickr Commons tools – ‘on this day’ & interactive map

I’ve been having a play with some new tools to help people explore the wealth of images that exist on Flickr Commons.

The first one is a gallery which allows you to view images from certain dates, and not just from specific dates but also things like ‘on this day’ which displays images from a specific day and month in any year. You can also look for things like ‘all images taken in January 1896′ or even just all 1896 images, or all January images. So go ahead, check your birthday, you know you want to!

The second one is a new version of the interactive map, which takes work that I had done previously putting Commons images on Google Earth and the smartphone-based Layar augmented reality app and delivers it in your web browser, using OpenStreetMap (an open source alternative to Google Maps). You can browse around the world and zoom in to specific locations, and it will display up to 250 of the most ‘interesting’ images at that location. Some great places to start exploring are Dublin and New York.