BlogDale

Recently Julie asked how to geotag her photos. Julie does a lot of travelling and she wants her photos to show where they were taken. I used to use GeoBloggers’ excellent solution but the developer got hired by Yahoo! so things slowed a little when he closed the site. Now the plot thickens and it looks like

Flickr are developing drag ‘n’ drop geotagging, as reported by TechCrunch.Zooomr does it already, not bad for a new kid on the block. I’m just starting to play with Zooomr and it looks good so far.Now, geotagging on Flickr isn’t hard in the first place - just add the tags for the photo as geo:latxx.xxxxxx and geo:lonyy.yyyyyy. Now the photo knows where it was taken. (While you’re at it, you might want to add a tag called “geotagged” so you can easily find it later).Once you’ve added geographical information to your photo as to where you took it, the photo itself becomes a lot more useful as a record of where you’ve been. (Actually, I find it faintly embarrassing for people to know that I travel so little, but if you like travel photos then Julie’s blog is the place to go). It’s adding that geo info that’s the trick. You can use various tools to place your photos on a map by dragging - I use the most excellent GMiF Flickr add-in which has loads of useful features, but there are other tools - and tell it to add the tags to the pic. (Or you can wait for the Yahoo!/Flickr drag ‘n’ drop feature to go live). Or you can use the co-ords from your GPS if you have one.Once you’ve geotagged the pics you can use FlickrFly or GMiF or whatever to get Google Earth to fly to your pic on the globe, which is REALLY cool. AND you can create a photoset to generate a photo-tour (the latest version of Google Earth Plus allows you to upload tracks from your GPS. More of this in a later post).

Trouble is, you might think you need your photos in a Flickr account to be able to geotag them.
But No. Read on…

Digital cameras are more clever than many people realise. When a pic is taken, everybody knows that time and date are recorded but not everybody uses the rest of the exif data that also records a host of other photographic variables such as shutter speed, aperture, what camera took it, did the flash fire, etc. Smart eh?. Doesn’t record where you were when you took it though (unless you have one of these). Shame.Imagine taking a photo with your digital camera and it recording your position on the earth’s surface. Now wouldn’t that be cool? But it seems that it’s taking ages for camera and gps manufacturers to cotton on to the idea and unless want to spend big money on a gps-enabled camera you need to do some manual matching of photos to location. It’s all down to matching the timestamps of your location and the exif data.

Once the pic is on your pc, all you need to do is match the time-at-location with the time-the-pic-was-taken and the job’s done. There are software solutions that will do this for you, such as RoboGeo or

GPS Photo-Link which write the geotag info to the exif data of the photo itself. So when you publish to Flickr you don’t need to go through the secondary stage of placing the photos on the map, or adding the lat/long info manually because that data is part of the exif data of the pic anyway, thus it can be geo-located outside Flickr too.Those of us with a GPS already can get our data from the device itself, but if you’re looking for a GPS device simply for geotagging photos then things just got easier somewhat.From www.ohgizmo.com I found Sony’s GPS-CS1 device which will clip to (rather than “attach to” - it’s only a clipon. With a clip, not an adapter) your camera and record where you took pictures. You’ll need to make sure that your camera and the gps timecoders are synchronised or you might get some really interesting results… p>’course, it’s still a 3-part process; get the phots on the PC, run the software to geotag them, then upload. A GPS camera would allow you to simply upload the photo.

Update: On reflection I am convinced that a real GPS would be more use than this gizmo. Something like the Garmin eTrex is about the same price and has much more built-in functionality.