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.
