Geotag, You're It!

Not so long ago, I bought a Canon Powershot A620 digital camera. I love the camera (another story, another time), but now I'm trying to figure out what to do with all the pictures.

The only problem with the camera is cataloging all the great pictures. An emerging idea is geotagging (a.k.a. geocoding), or including latitude and longitude information in a photo's metadata. Since most digital cameras already time stamp photos, adding a geotag makes it easy to find a photo if you can remember when and where you took it. Once I decided I wanted to geotag my photos, the problems began.

Geotagging is an emerging photographic technology. If you want to geotag your photos, the first thing you have to know about is photo metadata, or the data the accompanies your digital image in the file you think of as a photo file. The old metadata format is IPTC, the new metadata format is Exif. You might want to know that the emerging XML standard related to all this is XMP (eXtensible Metadata Platform). What you really want to know, though, is that Exif is the way to go for your photo metadata.

Deciding on Exif is the easy part. Soon you will be able to buy GPS-enabled cameras, but for now you need some way to insert the geotag in your photos' Exif metadata. Some clever photographers carry GPS handhelds, and take a picture of the latitude and longitude read-out whenever they take a picture. When you can use Google Earth to geotag your photos, though, carrying a GPS handheld seems a little cumbersome.

Deciding to use Google Earth to geotag your photos is the easy part. Then you have to decide where you will store your photos. Will you store pictures on your local computer (heaven forbid your disk crashes or someone steals your computer), or will you store your pictures on a web-based service like flickr or Picasa? In point of fact, Picasa is both a PC-based and a web-based solution, but the web-based part is a little behind flickr at the moment.

Deciding to store your photos online is the easy part. Then you have to figure out how you want to integrate your online storage with your cell phone camera, your blog, your geotagging software, your Mac or PC, and your computer's photo software (e.g., iPhoto if you're a Mac head). You might want to make Google Earth, Google Maps, or Yahoo Maps tours with your photos, too. This is where your brain might feel like a donut being twisted around a pretzel.

For instance, if you have a PC and want to use flickr, read about geotagging with Google Earth.

If you love iPhoto, or have all your snaps on iPhoto, you might want to read about how to move to Picasa, and about how to move to flickr and create a geotagged Google Earth tour (very cool and geeky).

For kicks, here is a seminal Engadget article on making Google Earth tours from your photos.

When everyone geotags and puts their photos online, the mash-up possibilities are great. I won't need to rely on the word tags people add to their photos to find, say, all the pictures of the Empire State building or the Golden Gate Bridge taken today or yesterday. Along with time stamps, I might be able to find out who was taking pictures at the same time and place I was. Maybe I'll find people who share my interest in locations like Moab, Utah.

My friend Brad puts everything on flickr and swears by it. My anxious side says, "don't use flickr because Google will figure out better ways to integrate Google Earth and Picasa" (both Google properties). If Picasa worked on a Mac, I'd take the Picasa leap in a second.

Over the coming year, Yahoo and Google will figure out how to integrate geotagging with their map and earth imaging services. That's probably the time to make the leap and decide where to park your photo inventory. When you decide that, you can tell me how to solve my legacy problem: what to do with all my old slides and negatives.


Update: here's another interesting GPS application. GPStimers makes a timer for lights or irrigation control that always has the correct local time, even after a power outage.