What are the Flickr shapefiles?
The Flickr shapefiles are a visualization of the shape of the places where people have geotagged their photos on Flickr. For every geotagged photo we store up to six Where On Earth (WOE) IDs. These are unique numeric identifiers that correspond to the hierarchy of places where a photo was taken: the neighbourhood, the town, the county, and so on up to the continent. (This process is usually referred to as “reverse-geocoding”.) Over time this got us wondering: If we plotted all the geotagged photos associated with a particular WOE ID, would we have enough data to generate a mostly accurate contour of that place? Not a perfect representation, perhaps, but something more fine-grained than a bounding box. It turns out we can. The shapefiles are available either as a single data dump or, via the API.
