Return a place ID for a latitude, longitude and accuracy triple.
The flickr.places.findByLatLon method is not meant to be a (reverse) geocoder in the traditional sense. It is designed to allow users to find photos for
"places" and will round up to the nearest place type to which corresponding place IDs apply.
For example, if you pass it a street level coordinate it will return the city that contains the point rather than the street, or building, itself.
It will also truncate latitudes and longitudes to three decimal points.
The gory details :
This is (most of) the same magic that is performed when you geotag one of your photos on the site itself. We know that at the neighbourhood level this
can get messy and not always return the correct location.
At the city level things are much better but there may still be some gotchas floating around. Sometimes it's as simple as a bug and other times it is an
issue of two competing ideas of where a place "is".
This comes with the territory and we are eager to identify and wherever possible fix the problems so when you see something that looks wrong please be
gentle :-)
(Reports of incorrect places sent to mailing list will not be ignored but it would be better if you could use the forums for that sort of thing.)
Also, as we do on the site if we can not identify a location for a point as a specific accuracy we pop up the stack and try again. For example, if we
can't find a city for a given set of coordinates we try instead to locate the state.
As mentioned above, this method is not designed to serve as a general purpose (reverse) geocoder which is partly reflected by the truncated lat/long
coordinates.
If you think that three decimal points are the cause of wonky results locating photos for places, we are happy to investigate but until then it should be
All Good (tm).
This method does not require authentication.