Flickr has just launched Places, a new location-centric way to explore the best photography in the world. Harnessing the site's geo-tagging features (which allow users to plot their photos on a map), Places creates a page for most major cities, regions, and countries, featuring popular photos, popular photographers, popular tags, and popular groups for that area.

In addition to checking out the fun that is Toronto's page (top recent tags: "santaclausparade" and "parade," current temperature 9º), you can explore Ontario, Canada, Las Vegas, South Africa, or New Zealand, or 100,000 other places. If you want to go hyper-local, just use their new and improved map and zoom wayyy in (or get hypo-local and zoom wayyy out). And don't forget about our Flickr pool, which is now one of the largest in the city, with over 1,300 photographers and 26,000 photos to browse through, and which we staunchly maintain has the best photographers in the city in it.

More information about Places is available on the Flickr blog.