![]() ![]() All the technologies exist to make this ideal happen. To do that, handset makers, software developers, carriers and others must all work together to support the greater cause of geotagging. Location information can later be "read" by software that can do powerful things. The geotagging ideal is for a digital camera or camera phone to always know its location, and automatically and instantly add the exact location to a picture's metadata, just like time and date are now added to all the photos you currently take. ![]() It's not hard to imagine a network like Flickr taking this to the next level, where individual users post millions of pictures that are geotagged, then those pictures are entered into the big database to be used in reverse for identifying the location of objects in the world through photo recognition.Ī company called NXP Software has developed technology called swGPS that does in software what normally requires a chip, which it says lowers the cost, increases the speed and reduces the power demand of automatic geotagging - perfect for tiny camera phones. A remote mega-computer quickly identifies the building, and sends back location information to your phone about the specific location. By taking a picture of one of the landmarks with your camera phone, the software sends that picture via your phone's data connection for processing. The idea is that thousands - potentially millions - of "landmarks" in a given city are indexed in a database and associated with exact coordinates. unveiled a research project at its TechFest event this week that identifies your location using the picture itself. This points to likely approaches in future camera phones - geotagging and location awareness using the best means available, including GPS, cell tower information and other data. It's also possible to combine cell tower geolocation with GPS information. The biggest disadvantage is that it works only on some phones and with some carriers. One advantage of this is that tower-based location works when you're indoors. ZoneTag, which is being developed by Yahoo Research and is already available in unfinished form online, is designed to help you tag photos for Flickr and upload them - all from your phone.Įven more impressive, it can also auto-tag a location based on which cell tower your camera phone is using when you upload photos to Flickr. The march toward ubiquitous geotagging camera phones took huge leaps forward with some recently announced research. There is hardware and software for automatically geotagged photos, but nobody has put it all together in a warm-and-fuzzy consumer camera phone. The GPS functions in these phones aren't hooked up to autogeolocating functions, however, but adding GPS to phones is the first step. It requires that you buy a Geko 301 GPS receiver from Garmin.ĭozens of camera phones already sport built-in GPS, including the Nokia N95, RIM BlackBerry 8800 and the HTC P3600 Windows Mobile smart phone. Later, you can use third-party software to merge all that data with the picture files themselves. When you take a picture, the GeoTagger captures the location via GPS - even the direction the lens is pointed using an internal compass. You can also use Trippermap Geotagger to employ the powerful Google Earth in a way that supports Flickr geotagging.Ī product called the Jelbert GeoTagger attaches to a digital camera's flash shoe. By dragging and dropping each thumbnail onto the location on the map where it was taken, Flickr geocodes it. It works by showing you a satellite view or map of any place on Earth, plus thumbnails of your uploaded photos. ![]() But that process is obviously not easy enough to be useful to the general public. Later, software matches the exact time a photo was taken with the location of the GPS device at that same moment as seen in the log, and voila, the picture can be geotagged. The most common approach is the use of special hardware that "logs" where a GPS device is at every moment. Scientists and hardcore geotagging photo enthusiasts have been doing this for years, but it's been hard, slow and expensive. In the same way that the time and date are encoded into digital photos, data that records the location where the picture was taken can also be added automatically using existing standard file formats like JPEG. Geotagging, also known as geocoding, is the insertion of latitude and longitude data into a file or document, such as a digital photograph. People won't fully understand how powerful, useful and fun automatically geotagged photos will be until they start taking them. I think one of the most exciting and useful cell phone features of the near future is the automatic geotagging of photos on camera phones. ![]()
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