No Flickr, I didn’t take my photos in Ramallah

I went for a walk through part of Modi’in yesterday and shared photos from the walk on Flickr. I noticed that the photos I took with my phone were geolocated at the correct location but, for some reason, Flickr tagged the locations as “Ram Allah, West Bank, Palestine”.

Here is an example (I geolocated my Nikon photos at the same location as my phone photos):

Flickr uses OpenStreetMap for its maps. When I clicked on the map preview in the image, it took me to Modi’in (which is correct) and yet the caption on the photos is a totally different city.

I don’t read Arabic so I couldn’t tell you exactly where Ramallah is on OpenStreetMap through Flickr’s map interface but here are Modi’in and Ramallah in Google Maps:

Leaving aside whether the caption in Flickr, “Ram Allah, West Bank, Palestine”, is a correct designation in itself, why are my photos tagged with that location when their actual locations are very much in Modi’in in Central Israel?

I’m sure the explanation for this is an interesting one.

Image credit: Dariusz Sankowski