Flickr, Yahoo’s photo site, has recently announced a new feature: Flickr Places.

The ability to geotag photos has been available for a while now — well over a year. This new offering allows users to browse photos by place. According to the announcement over 30 million photos have been tagged! Flickr Places starts at http://flickr.com/places/ . You can explore some maps that are provided by Flickr or you can do a search. Searching for Hollywood, for example, gave me several options including Hollywood California and Hollywood Florida. I looked at Hollywood California and got, pictures of Hollywood… Maryland? Not quite what I was looking for. When I searched directly for Hollywood California, I still got Maryland photos.

I tried again, this time for Benin. This time it worked! I got a map of Benin, suggestions for other places, and an assortment of photographs. (You can list them by their interesting factor, or by the date they were added.) There were featured photographers related to Benin, groups related to Benin, and a search box that will search just those photographs that are geotagged for Benin. There are also popular tags related to photographs taken in Benin.

To get to the photo pages, click on the photos themselves. What a great way to explore. I would come here first if I was planning to go somewhere and wanted to get a sense of what that place was like.