Flickr goes with OpenStreetMap

Flickr has announced the ability to display geotagged photos using OpenStreetMap as the base map with the goal of providing better street level geographic data than what was previously available.  To kick off the change, Flickr posted before and after pictures of street level data for Beijing in honor of the 2008 Olympics:

Thanks to the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license in use at OpenStreetMap, we are able to download and make use of these hand-crafted map tiles to improve the street-level resolution of the Beijing map in Flickr.

Flickr also recently introduced a new way to geotag photos:

“We’ve added an easy-peasy way of adding Geo data without having to leave the comfort of your own photo page. On the right side of your photo, in the Additional Information section you’ll see a new “Add to your map” link, it’ll pop-up a new map which you can literally put your photo on.“