WildlifeNearYou can now tag your Flickr photos for you

WildlifeNearYou was featured on the official Flickr blog yesterday, and we're excited to welcome a whole bunch of new spotters - you've added more than 1,400 wildlife photos to the site in the past 48 hours! Don't forget to help rate the new pictures using our best photo tool.

As a token of thanks to the many Flickr users who have imported their photos, we've just launched an exciting new feature: WildlifeNearYou can now tag your photos over on Flickr with the common and latin names of any species you have identified.

If you've associated your photo with a trip to a place, we can set the location of your photo on Flickr as well.

You'll need to opt-in to enable the feature - we'll ask you for your preferences the first time you try to import more photographs, or you can visit your Flickr tagging preferences directly. Once you've opted in we'll try to automatically tag your photos within 15 minutes of you adding species to them on WildlifeNearYou.

We're very careful not to over-write anything, so we won't set the location on your photo if you have already set it yourself on Flickr. We keep track of any changes we have made, so if you think we've done something wrong please get in touch and we'll be happy to fix the problem for you.

Machine tags too (here's where it gets technical)

In addition to tagging the species and the place, we've also started adding machine tags to your photos. These provide powerful ways to explore your WildlifeNearYou images on Flickr, and also mean that developers can start to work with WildlifeNearYou data using the Flickr API.

Here's an example: take a look at my photo of a squirrel on Flickr. WildlifeNearYou has tagged it with "Squirrel" and "Sciurus carolinensis", and set the location to Queens Park. It has also added the following machine tags:

• wlny:photo=i2we
• wlny:species=s8a
• wlny:trip=t8d
• wlny:place=p7k
• wlny:geotagged=1

The first four machine tags identify which photo, species, trip and place on WildlifeNearYou are associated with the image. The identifiers are the same as the ones we use for our wlny.eu URL shortener, so you can visit wlny.eu/s8a to see our species page about squirrels.

The last machine tag simply indicates that WildlifeNearYou set the location on this photo - if the photo had already been given a location, WildlifeNearYou would have left it alone and would not have added that tag.

If you view the machine tags on the Flickr page (you'll have to expand the "machine tags" area first) you'll notice that each one is a link. You can use those links to see all of my photos on Flickr that share that same machine tag - all of the other photos of the same species, or from the same trip. If you click the globe icon you'll see all photos from everyone else for those things. Here are everyone's WildlifeNearYou photos of squirrels, for example.

This also means that if you are a developer you can use the machine_tags argument to Flickr's photo search API to explore photos from WildlifeNearYou.