Posts from — January 2010

Over the last few years geotagging has become more and more popular with photographers – and with good reason, it’s nice to know where that photo was taken. The problem is that most compact cameras and even professional digital SLR cameras do not come with this ability built-in. So how are the amateurs and professionals doing it? They use devices like the Sony GPS-CS3KA GPS, or the GiSTEQ PhotoTrackr. Nikon DSLR shooters have the best option here with the plug-in Nikon GP-1, but at $200 it is not an inexpensive one.

The universal devices work like this: after you are done shooting with your compact or SLR camera, you eject the memory card and insert it into the GPS geotagging device. The device takes a coordinate reading and embeds it as a file on the memory card. When you return home and load your photos the coordinates are then synced to the image files using included software.  Confused yet? These gadgets are far from perfect, but for most users this is the only way to do it.

However, if you happen to have a smartphone with built-in geotagging (iPhone 3G, DROID, Palm Pre – to name a few) you have the ability to “manually” geotag your photos, and it is easier than you think. As soon as you move into a new area where you will be snapping photos, take a landmark shot with your phone, it could be a unique object or even just you holding up a unique number of fingers or gesture. Then take this same shot with your real camera. Your phone will have geotagged the shot automatically, so now when you get home and load up your photos, you can reference back to that phone photo to get the location info.

Obviously, this method is quite manual, but during a recent road trip up Pacific Coast Highway out in California, it proved to be quite useful in keeping track of the photos I took with my DSLR. Trust me, every redwood and vineyard looks the same! It is surprising to me that more cameras are not shipping with built-in geotagging, but this will likely change in the coming years. For now, most of us will have to deal with a sloppy card reader device or using a GPS enabled mobile phone, but hey, it is better than nothing!

See the real photos below on Flickr: