We’ve always had in mind that people would use Flickr to organize their photos in “ways we haven’t thought of yet” – it’s why we make public photo data available via RSS feeds, and why we released the Flickr API, which allows outside developers to build new applications that interface with Flickr.

We’ve seen a number of really excellent tools built using our API recently – but the latest one rocks our socks all the way to Biloxi:

Check out Mappr! – a new tool by our friends over at Stamen in San Francisco. It takes photos you’ve uploaded into Flickr, looks to see if you’ve tagged them with place names (like “Omaha” and “Nebraska,” or “San Francisco” and “California”) and places them on a map of the US. A few sets of tags are already up, for example:
all photos tagged with ‘Christmas’, Eric Snowdeal’s awesome postcard project
as well as pictures in California.

More sets are coming soon – plans are afoot to map the upcoming Day In The Life Project, and the project will be open to Flickr users any day now. You can join the Mappr group to find out more about the project. The kids over at Stamen are full of ideas, and they’ll be showing us in next few months about how Mappr can be made even better.