Flickr already allowed third-party developers to search for photos within a certain radius, but regular users could not easily access this feature from within Flickr.

Besides the default settings, you can also choose to only see pictures taken by your contacts, or images that were taken at a certain date, and within a certain radius from the original picture.

You can access these 'nearby' pages by either adding '/nearby' to the URL of any image that has been geotagged, or by first clicking on the map link under 'Additional Information' and then 'See nearby photos and videos.' It would be nice if Flickr made it a bit easier to access this feature by just adding a link from the actual photo page.

In the announcement, Flickr also explains a number of more advanced query parameters that you can use to find nearby pictures, and it will be interesting to see what third-party developers will do with this.

This is definitely a cool new way to explore Flickr's photo collection. By default, there is a certain degree of randomness to which photos you will see, which makes using this new feature even more fun.

Flickr, by the way, celebrates its 5th birthday tomorrow and now hosts over 3 billion images.