June 3, 2008

GeoTagging - GPS for Your Camera - fotosam @ 3:35 pm

By Katie Johnson

Storing thousands of digital images can be a chore, but finding the image you want amongst the thousands is the needle in the haystack. Metadata is what your camera embeds with every shot telling you when and how you captured each shot. But until geotagging came along, the “where” has been missing from the equation.

This new data resource doesn’t just let you see where you shot your photos, it opens up a whole new resource for the public. Flickr already lets you search images by location. This can help you not only “visit” a place at the click of a mouse, but if you combine location with the right search criteria, you can find something you missed. Were you in Switzerland for their independence day, but your camera died right before the fireworks? No problem. Search by time and place and find someone else’s images of the majestic display.

Eye-Fi’s new “Eye-Fi Explore” Wi-Fi memory card is about to take the pain out of geotagging. It will write the latitude and longitude information into the Exif data in any camera that can take an SD card. At $130, it’s not likely to break the bank and I think it’s going to help geotagging take off. Canon promises geotagging support in upcoming models, and Nikon’s D3 and D300 let you hook a GPS unit up to the camera body via cable.

You can also use a GPS logger which will log your location information at intervals and save it to a file. As long as its clock and your cameras are in sync, software can later sort out the information and add the geotag to your image. If you prefer software over gadgets, Geophoto is my favorite. It lets you drag your photos to a map, in effect geotagging manually, but it can be time consuming.

Taking an iPhone photo of your parked car in a stadium lot and using geotagging to help you find it later? Awesome. Taking photos of your brand new home theater system to show friends on Flickr? Well, I hope you’ve got a good alarm system on your house. You’ll want to make sure you change the privacy settings as the situation requires. There will be privacy issues involved with online geotagging, but giving up personal information in return for convenience is something most of us are used to with the internet.

Geotagging applications for the pro photographer range from organizational assistance to checking out other geotagged images of locations for shooting. Just make sure when you post photos from a shoot at your “secret location” you keep your geotag to yourself!