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Mobile technology should not be about cramming the office into your pocket but a way to enjoy your everyday life.

Geotagging

06-AUG-2006

I have been experimenting with geotagging for about two years now and finally got it to work on a large scale. One of the most promising software's I have tested have been RoboGEO which can add GPS coordinates to a batch of photos by writing the coordinates into the EXIF headers of the photos based on a tracklog from any GPS device. It compares the timestamps in the photos with the timestamps in the GPS log and picks the closest coordinates for inclusion in the EXIF headers. Since I usually wear a wrist GPS when travelling, this means I have logs with usable coordinates for a lot of my photos. Unfortunately, until the most resent version of RoboGEO, I was not able to get this to work properly. But now it does.

Too bad I can't batch-update already uploaded photos.

But there is a problem with geotagging at Flickr: geobloggers.com made it populare using tags and a "home made" integration of Yahoo's Flickr service and Google's Google Earth/Map - two rivals. It was kind of obvious this solution would not last nor could it become really mainstream. In fact, geobloggers.com does not work anymore, but the person behind it is now working for Yahoo and I am quite confident Yahoo/Flickr will have a end-to-end solution for geotagging photos eventually. But in the mean time, what is the most future proof way to do it today?

And of course Google is at it too with their webpicasa.google.com and the Picasa client integrates nicely with Google Earth and makes manual geotagging simple: you select an image in Picasa and a place using Google Earth, and when you click "geotag", the coordinates are added to the image.