How to geotag your photos

Geotagging is the process of adding exact latitude and longitude to photos so that they can be shown up later overlaid onto maps or satellite images.

Nokia is leading the way here on its S60 platform, with the free Location Tagger utility (www.nokia.com/betalabs/locationtagger) sitting in the background and jumping in to add current GPS coordinates to any photos that you take – it’s clever too, in that it caches your position for a short period so that photos taken just before jumping on a tube train (for example) still get tagged properly.

Geotagging photos will be commonplace on smartphones of all varieties within 12 months and facilities are already in place to import geotagged photos into the common photo sharing web sites, such as Flickr and Picasa Web.

In each case, there’s the option to view your photos on a schematic or satellite map soon after uploading. Note that in Flickr’s case you have to go into ‘Your account>Privacy and permissions’ and manually enable a couple of settings before geotagging data is used.

You should take privacy seriously, by the way, as you probably won’t want casual browsers seeing location information for photos taken at home (and thus knowing exactly where you live) – usually the solution is to turn off location tagging most of the time and only enable it in your smartphone’s (camera) software when on a specific, interesting trip.

If this all sounds a bit geeky, then you’re wrong – it isn’t. Showing people an interactive map of your holiday (for example), with all your photos as thumbnails in the right locations, so that they can click on just the ones they want and ‘follow their nose’ is a great way to bring your holiday snaps to life.

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