We've always been keen to offer property searchers a way to see what their prospective new home looks like. Not just the house or flat, but the surrounding area as well.
For the past few months we've used photos from Flickr. These were good (especially once Flickr added geotagging), but now we've found something better.
Hard at work all across these blessed British Isles is a horde of photographically gifted volunteers. For the past few months they've been virtuallly gathering at geograph.org.uk. Their self-proclaimed mission, to
"produce a freely accessible archive of educationally useful, geographically located photographs of the British Isles".
The photos are often exceedingly beautiful, and best of all they have great coverage of just about every little corner of the UK. Check out these examples:
| Lighthouse, St. Agnes Isles of Scilly  by Darren Smith |
Mooa Clett, Whalsay Shetland  by John Dally |
On behalf of the property searching community, Nestoria offers a heartfelt thanks to all the geograph.org.uk volunteers and organizers (especially Barry Hunter). From today forward you can find the geograph photos in the "Pics" tab of the local content section of our search results page.
One happy footnote to this project: in doing the integration Spiros, one of the Nestoria developers, wrote a publicly available perl module to access the excellent geograph API. Read the details on his blog.
Join the 
Spiros link is broken, try http://idaru.blogspot.com/2006/11/geographorguk-api.html
silly me. thanks fixed.
Speaking about “geotagging”: do you know locr?
locr offers the ideal solution and makes geotagging exceptionally easy. locr uses GoogleMaps with detailed maps and high-resolution satellite images. To geotag your photos just enter address, let locr search, fine-tune the marker, accept position, and done! If you don’t know the exact address simply use drag&drop to set the position.
For automatic geotagging you need a datalog GPS receiver in additon to your digital camera. The GPS receiver data and the digital camera data is then automatically linked together by the locr software. All information will be written into the EXIF header.
Use the “Show in Google Earth” button to view your photos in Google Earth.
With locr you can upload photos with GPS information in them without any further settings. In the standard view, locr shows the photo itself, plus the place it was taken. If you want to know more about the place where the photo was taken, just have at look at the Wikipedia articles which are also automatically assigned to the picture.
Have a look at http://www.locr.com.