At the moment I’m involved in redesigning a well know online mapping service. I’m a bit of a photo sharing Flickr nut anyhow, but digging into the map/geospatial blogosphere I started finding more and more articles and posts on people who were Geotagging their pictures. Infact, I’d known that this has been going for a while but hadn’t yet stuck my head under the bonnet (or hood if you’re reading this Stateside).
‘Geotagging’ basically means one of two things, a) you can add longtitude and latitude information to your associated tags, or b)that the ‘long’ and ‘lat’ info is embedded into the images’ EXIF data. But seeing as I don’t have a GPS enabled camera (that automatically does b) for you) I have been using some Flickr / Google mashups to hand crank the geo data.
First up is GMIF which is a Flickr mashup that places a GMAP button on your toolbar on the Flickr website. Clicking it allows you to use a Google map to locate the place where you took the picture and then ‘Tag it!’. As you tag it the long and lat coordintaes are added. Nice and simple.
So what’s the point of tagging it if all you see are some 15 digit numbers in the images tag set?
Well, second up is FlickrFly from Flickr user RobRoyAus. This is a cool little tool that enables the geotagged image to be located and ‘flown’ to using Google Earth.
Proper geeky, but really cool if you ask me. It’s certainly been good for showing family where my daughter first made a sandcastle.
I shall be painstakingly geotagging my worthy pictures over the next few weeks because I’m not buying a GPS camera soon with a second baby due to arrive and week now.
mexican chick