Add context to your photos with Geotagging

Image via Wikipedia

Geotagging lets you add geographic information, such as latitude and longitude as indicated by the integrated GPS system, to any digital content — from pictures and videos to news articles and blog posts . So when you take a picture/video or post a blog your location is also saved. Then you can overlay that information on services like Google Maps, and see where you’ve been.

According to Chadha, Sirf’s vice president of marketing

A location stamp is much more important than a time stamp in most cases. A year down the road, you have no idea where those pictures were taken and no way to search for location.

What’s wonderful is the ease of use, it’s not something I have to think about, the phone (or digital camera) automatically embeds the GPS coordinates.

I believe what Geotagging’s really about is bringing the virtual community to the physical world, walking with a GPS phone down a street past a church in Goa, I can bring up geo-tagged blogs that have been left by people who have passed that same place some time before me, or when planning a visit I can choose the sites based on the pictures people have taken on location which pop right up in the map itself.

We’re already seeing it making inroads in Phones and mobile applications.  Apple’s new iPhone 2.0 supports it and other major handset manufacturer’s like Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Samsung have introduced phones with Geotagging capability. On the applications side Shozu the popular App that lets you transfer pictures, videos and also post blog entries has it built-in.

If your phone doesn’t support Geotagging, Wired has a great article that explains how you can Geotag your photos from desktop or the web.

Related articles

• SiRF Creating GPS For Android Phones [Cellphones] [via Zemanta]
• iPhone 2.0 stores GPS location data in photos [via Zemanta]
• Down to earth: Geotagging photos [via Zemanta]