So far, we've accessed data from Flickr, saved it to a file, added it to our map and created a simple photo thumbnail style. This is pretty cool, but we really haven't done much other than just load in the data, from an OpenLayers's point of view. It's useful, but we really haven't created a full-featured web application just yet. So, let's focus on how to build a more useful web-mapping application. To do this, we'll basically need to do two general things:
Let's focus on the first part, and then change the data source after we develop some interactivity.
We need to decide what interactivity we'd like to provide to make our application interactive for our users. We'd like our users to be able to click on a photo and see relevant information. For this, we can use the select interaction. What should happen when we select a feature? We'll want to show information about the feature we clicked on, and that information is the Flickr photo itself and any associated attributes. So, let's keep things for now and show the photo's information below the map when a feature is selected.