Yahoo-owned photo sharing site Flickr has unveiled a service allowing users to browse millions of geo-tagged photos by place name and maps.

The Places feature allows visitors to search for photos based on place names, as well as the ability to locate Flickr photos using a global map zooming feature.

Flickr Places lets users pinpoint local 'hot spots' of Flickr contributions, and to search by more than 100,000 place names.

Flickr claimed that 3,000 to 5,000 new Places will be added each week, collating regional information including local weather and maps.

"Places is a new way to browse what is happening in the world," said Kakul Srivastava, senior director of product management at Flickr.

The company recently celebrated the upload of its two-billionth photo, and claims to have more than 40 million monthly visitors.

Up to three million photos are posted every day, a growing proportion of which are categorised according to location, according to the company.

Flickr Places is now live and covers languages including English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese and Korean.