Geotagging your digital photos

By Ian Grayson on 11 June 2008

Get Adobe Flash player

Struggling to keep control of your growing collection of digital photos? Breathe easy — you're not alone.

With digital cameras making it easy to take images of just about every aspect of daily life, budding photographers are left wrestling with the best way of labelling them so they can be saved and shared with friends and family.

While file names, key words and captions can help with the process, a new technique promises to change the way photos are stored and viewed — it's called geotagging.

As the term suggests, geotagging involves attaching tags to digital photos that describe exactly where they were taken. It's a simple concept, but it opens up an exciting range of new ways in which such tagged photos can be used.



How geotagging works
Geotagging involves finding the latitude and longitude of the place a photo was taken and embedding this information in the photo using a standard format called EXIF (Exchangeable Image Format).

Used by most digital cameras, EXIF stores everything from the time and date an image was taken to the type of camera used and its exposure settings. Geotagging just adds a little more data into the mix.

Labelling your images in this way provides another way to categorise them. Rather than trying to remember the date you took that memorable holiday to Queensland or the file names you used when downloading them, you can find your photos simply by searching for a particular location.

Topics: geotagging, geocoding, exif, digital photos, coordinates, location, gps, picasa, flickr, longitude, latitude, panoramio

Related Articles

Comments (3)

  • Valerie commented on 02/04/2009 17:34 Report abuse

    I use my iPhone 3G as a GPS tracker while shooting with my Nikon D40x. The iPhone app GeoLogTag ($5) is very easy to use and accuracy is awesome (within a few meters). I use the GPX file generated by GeoLogTag in combination with GPSPhotoLinker (free) to do the geotagging on my Mac. This makes it a very cheap geotagging solution for me.

    http://www.galarina.eu/GeoLogTag/How_To.html
    http://www.earlyinnovations.com/GPSPhotoLinker

  • gpsphotographer commented on 20/01/2009 07:24 Report abuse

    I just wanted to chime in on your discussion about geotagging your images...

    Found Maperture Pro for Aperture from Ãœbermind that is currently in BETA testing. It allows for visual geotagging & reverse geocoding of your images as well as automatic GPS tagging from a tracklog data file. The software seems to be definitely in the right direction and is really stable thus far. Far superior than anything I've tried for trying to stamp GPS information into my images.

    It also allows you to upload already geotagged images to view on the map!

    Here's the link...

    http://www.ubermind.com/beta

    If you're looking for a GPS geotagging solution, this is my vote!

  • fharun commented on 07/01/2009 20:27 Report abuse

    You said that high end cameras such as Canon 40D is able to "directly connect an external GPS receiver". Can you explain how is this done? As i'm a 40D user and would like to have geo-tagging capabilities.

Post your own comment

You must read and type the 6 chars within 0..9 and A..F

You must read and type the 6 chars within 0..9 & A..F

Submit

Enter your personal information to the left, or sign in with your Facebook account by clicking the button below.

Connect

The Explain Series

Must read