geotagging

Microsoft hopes new photo tool will boost Windows

Microsoft likes digital photography enthusiasts as customers, and on Thursday plans to release a free new utility designed to keep them wedded to Windows.

Pro Photo Tools is geared for photography professionals and enthusiasts, and its first notable feature is the ability to geotag photos, or add geographic information showing where the picture was taken. Geotagging is an onerous chore with today's technology, but camera makers are working to build it into cameras, and it can pay off down the road.

That's because geotagging, done well, enables people to find photos by searching for the word "Paris&… Read more

Cameras with built-in geotagging on horizon

Geotagging, in which digital photos are labeled with the location where they were taken, is mostly unfamiliar to photographers today. But new developments are likely going to put the technology on the map.

In interviews at the Photo Marketing Association trade show in Las Vegas recently, several camera executives expressed an interest in geotagging and some companies were demonstrating technology. It's clear that mainstream geotagging is a matter of when, not if.

The strongest evidence I encountered is Air Semiconductor, a start-up building a chip designed to let cameras process GPS (Global Positioning System) satellite signals so latitude and … Read more

Geotate service geared to ease geotagging

LAS VEGAS--A company called Geotate hopes to use an Internet service to lower a significant barrier to the technologically challenging practice of geotagging.

Geotagging, which uses a global positioning system to attach location data to photos to build in more descriptive data, is at present a difficult and largely manual process appealing mostly to serious photo enthusiasts. That's largely because it's too hard right now to build GPS directly into a camera for automated geotagging, so photographers must carry a separate GPS device and then marry the location data to the photos after the fact.

But Geotate, which … Read more

GPS gadget aims to ease geotagging

ATP Electronics has announced a device called the GPS Photo Finder that's designed to take some of the trouble out of geotagging your photos.

The device, like many GPS receivers, keeps track of its location based on signals from satellites. What's different is that instead of marrying that location data with your photos on a computer using special software, the Photo Finder has an SD card slot and handles the tagging by itself, the company said. When you copy photos to your computer, the location data is embedded in the JPEG files.

The device should go on sale … Read more

Underexposed blog: Links of the day

Nikon still leads Canon for SLR market in Japan - It's not the whole world, but Japan is a very important market. Pentax is a distant third. Novel GPS widget geotags photos on your flash card - This is a great idea: you insert your camera's flash card into this GPS device and it handles the geotagging from there. A much simpler work flow. But does it work with raw formats? Wacky Microsoft Popfly live-action demo - Putting something of a human face on an obscure coding exercise. Dan Heller's Photography Business Blog: Gaming the Creative Commons for Profit … Read more

What's the best Web site for geotagged photos?

Readers of this blog will have inferred I'm a fan of geotagging--in fact, I'm trying to label all my photos with the tags that show where the picture was taken, even though the geotagging process is complicated.

I'm betting that much of the value of geotagging lies in the future, for example, when I might have a harder time remembering which hike a particular picture came from. But can anything useful be done with those geotagged photos today?

Based on my scrutiny of a handful of sites--Google's Picasa, Yahoo's Flickr, SmugMug (the only … Read more

Coming in 2008: GPS-enabled cameras?

The year of the GPS-enabled camera is nearly upon us.

So predicts Kanwar Chadha, founder of GPS chip designer Sirf Technology. "Most (camera makers) are seriously planning location-enabled cameras. The first," he said, "you'll see next year."

Chadha has a vested interest in the technology, so take that bullish prediction with a grain of salt, but don't discount his expertise, influence, and connections. And do pay attention to a new technology Sirf is developing that Chadha promises will let GPS devices find their location within 10 seconds of being switched on.

If his prediction … Read more

GPS goodness in Qstarz Travel Recorder

External GPS receivers are pretty handy if you want to turn your Bluetooth-enabled mobile phone into a satellite-navigation device. But imagine if you could use your external GPS receiver to keep a log of your travels and then be able to see your journey on Google Earth.

Better yet, imagine if you could use that GPS travel log to synchronize your digital pictures with their exact locations, so you can post them on sites such as Locr or Flickr and let your friends see where the pictures were taken. The Qstarz Travel Recorder BT-Q1000--the little black box in the pic--does … Read more

Mac OS X 10.5 gets geotagging support

There were a lot of one-liners to sift through in Apple's feature list for the Leopard, the Mac OS X 10.5 update due Friday, so I thought it worthwhile to call out the geotagging support.

The Preview software, which lets users get details on files they're browsing, "pinpoints the location where you took the photo on a world map," according to Apple's Leopard feature list. "From there you can even open the GPS location in Google Maps."

I gather from the adverb "even" that I should read this news with … Read more