Great question and great idea! The way we get images from Flickr in
the TagMaps application, right now, is pretty "dull": we just use the
Flickr API to get photos with the selected tag from the immediate tag
area (using Flickr search API you can specify a bounding-box-and-text
query). So, what you'd want to do it:
a. Get the tags for each region/zoom level using the TagMaps API
http://developer.yahoo.com/yrb/tagmaps/
b. Get (however many) images for each tag on the map using a
text-and-bounding-box query from Flickr:
http://flickr.com/services/api/flickr.photos.search.html
c. Sort the photos however way you like :)

Does this make sense? Good luck, and let us know what happened!
Also, I am sure you are aware of the TagMaps widget you can use to
re-create the tagmaps experience? It's also available from
http://developer.yahoo.com/yrb/tagmaps/

Mor

p.s. You may want to check our publication page where we were playing
with similar ideas using image analysis:
http://yahooresearchberkeley.com/blog/category/publications/ (see "How
Flickr Help us...").





--- In tagmaps@yahoogroups.com, "quin0ne" <ezsomething@...> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> Great work on this problem, kudos to your entire team. It's apparent
> that your system does a great job of cleaning up/removing extraneous
> images from flickr and provides a more succinct view of a
> location-based tag.
>
> Is it possible to get a data API call that will retrieve the relevant
> images for a tag -- after they've been processed by TagMaps? I am
> looking at research steps to re-order these images to get exactly what
> a user is interested in and perhaps glean a little more information
> about relevant tags from this visual cluster.
>
> I'm trying to analyze how we can improve tag recommendation based on
> TagMaps for a specific tag either with a content (image) analysis or
> tag frequency analysis. Unfortunately, I can't access the image IDs
> that popup in the handy flash explorer. So far, it looks like I have
> to go back to the unstructured flickr data and start the process
> myself (yuck!). Is there a way to get to these images over the API?
> I can't count the ways that this could help improve location-based
search.
>
> Thanks for any advice!
> Eric
>