Flico identifies landmarks in YouTube videos

Flico is a clever Chrome extension which can identify landmarks in YouTube videos and tell you more about them.

It’s easy to use. If you spot a landmark you don’t recognize, pause playback, click the Flico icon, then "Scan Landmarks", and the add-on goes to work.

We tried this with an image of Grauman’s Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard, and within a few seconds Flico had given us the correct location, and the opening section of its Wikipedia page.

At the bottom of that panel were buttons to open Google Street View at that location, display a map, or find nearby restaurants.

What about lesser landmarks? We pointed Flico at a couple of more obscure London examples and it correctly identified those, too.

There were failures, too. The add-on is presumably matching views with similar images, so if your shot is taken from an unusual angle, it might not be recognized.

It’s also important to keep in mind that Flico finds landmarks, not general locations. Flico probably won’t be able to identify a city from its skyline, for instance.

For some reason Flico also contains an entirely separate function which displays the definitions of words contained in the video frame (subtitles, say). There’s no translation involved, it’s English-language only, and even then the feature only worked occasionally for us. We say stick with the landmarks, that’s much more fun.

Flico is a free extension for Google Chrome.