I've been updating worldinpictures.org¹ to use the new flickr geocoding API. Unfortunately it doesn't provide a "find all photos near to a point ordered by distance" function, so I still need to keep a database of photo locations.

To keep my database up-to-date, I now to need to find the latest photos that have been "officially" geocoded, as well as those using the old unofficial geo:lon/geo:lat tags.

Turns out you can retrieve just the flickr photos that have been "officially" geocoded by setting the bbox parameter to cover the whole globe:

flickr.photos.search(bbox=-180,-90,180,90)

This is different to leaving out the bbox parameter (which would return all photos). Instead it essentially applies a filter which returns only those photos with official geocode information.