You Rock, go to gigs and take photos, yes?

Love last.fm too?

Yeah well, so do we. Turns out they love us as well. For over a year now they’ve been encouraging their users to machine tag flickr photos with last.fm event ids. This is what Martin had to say …

“As a geek I’m quite intrigued by Flickr’s machine tags feature we’re using to create this Last.fm/Flickr integration — it can become the basis for a number of interesting Flickr tools, and I’m confident people will come up with all kind of great ideas. (I’m personally waiting for someone to develop a Flickr tool to automatically geotag your event photos based on the venue address provided by Last.fm).”

(It takes us a while, but we’ll probably get round to that geotagging thing ‘soon’ Martin)

Here’s how they do it; from a specific event page on last.fm you’ll see this …

… telling you which machine tag to use.

You took some photos at the gig? Well then, throw the tag in there and computers will automatically do the rest. From last.fm’s end, they grab the photos from flickr to show on each event page … it’s also a great way to find other people who were at the same gig as you!

From our end (as of a few weeks ago thanks to Cal) it’ll look like this …

… a rather fetching last.fm icon, giving you the badge of honor telling everyone that you were really there and therefore how you loved LCD Soundsystem before everyone else.

If its an event we know about then we’ll already have the name. If its a brand spanking new event, we’ll get our system to talk to last.fm’s system, last.fm’s system will invite our system in for coffee, our system will play hard to get for a while, and then in the morning over fried eggs and bacon our system will have the new event name (honestly this is how it works, you should Cal’s code!).

So how many photos are tagged with last.fm events? Well around 621,793 last time I checked.

See more photos from Heineken Open’er Festival 2007 (last.fm).

Photo by alex-pl