GEO tagging with the N95 - that actually works!


I am the proud owner of an N95 and am ashamed to say that I have only just realised the joys of GEOtagging. What is GEO Tagging? Quite simply it is tagging your photos with the GPS location of where you took the photo.

Both Picasa & Flickr support GEO Tagging however for this post I will only reference to Picasa as this is the system that I use for online photo storage.

Unfortunatly at this stage the N95 does nto natively support GEO Tagging. Hopefully this will be remedied in future firmware updates.

Until that time there are a number of 3rd party GEO tagging solutions in the wild all of which are free to use and sync with the big two online galleries, Picasa and Flickr.

Shozu - This is the most popular of the 3rd party GEO Tagging apps.
By signing up for a free account and installing the mobile software you have the ability to tag the GPS co-ordinates of yor photo and then upload directly to your online photo gallery. The problem with Shozu is that it doesnt embed the GPS co-ordinates into the photo itself. Due to this I was unable to get Picasa to automaticlly pick up the geo location and display a map. I guess with more playing I may hae been able to get it to work but really you shouldnt have to put in alot of time to get these things to work.

ZoneTag - This is a free experiment by Yahoo and is only linked with Flickr. Again you have to create an account which gives you the ability to automaticlly upload your photos to flickr. Again however the software does not actually embed the GPS co-ordinates within the photo hence I couldnt get it to work either.

locr - This one worked! Yes it does ask you to create an account but it is not required. locr does actually embed the GPS co-ordinates into the photo which allowed Picasa to display its location. locr gives you the option to automaticlly or manually geotag your images which can definatly save on battery drain trying to hook up to the GPS satellite indoors.

For my money, locr is the clear choice for simple hastle free GEO Tagging.

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Comments

  1. Hi Decoder,
    Welcome to the wonderful world of geotagging :-) ShoZu does not currently embed geotags into the EXIF information as we did not want to alter the original files. Flickr understands the machine code tags we send along and puts you right on the Flickr map. Now that we have the framework in place we have a lot more solutions on the way for other sites so stay tuned.

    Best,
    Jambo (ShoZu)

    [Reply]


    Mark Jambas
    November 5th, 2007

  2. Hi Mark, thanks for the comment.
    I can understand your reluctance to modify the original file however I did find that this prevented Picasa (my photo gallery of choice) from receiving your machine code tags.

    Maybe you could provide your users with the option?

    Then it is their choice to modify the original files and it make your software instantly compatible with any Photo mapping service.

    I look forward to the next version of Shozu as I still use it, if not for the actual GEO Tagging of my photos but for wireless uploading of my photos to Picasa.

    If you are looking for a beta tester please let me know.

    [Reply]


    Luke McCallum
    November 10th, 2007

  3. Hi Luke,
    Thanks for the feature request, I’ll pass it on to the team :-) The more demand we have for certain things the more likely it is to be included in future releases.

    Thanks also for your beta testing request, we always keep a track of these and we’ll be in touch when things like this come up :-)

    Best,
    Jambo

    [Reply]


    Mark Jambas
    November 14th, 2007

  4. Hello,

    seems you forgot to mention that Nokia Labs provides such a geotagging solution for free. Just search on “Location Tagger”. All you have to do is to let it run in the background, and any picture taken will be automatically geotagged.

    [Reply]

    decoder Reply:
    November 26th, 2008 at 9:22 pm

    Hi Fred,

    At the time of the writing of that article Nokia Labs had yet to release Location tagger.

    It is a great little solution that is gradually being integrated in the latest Nokia handsets. My only wish is that Nokia add’s it to any future firmware updates for all current GPS enabled handsets.

    Cheers, decoder.

    [Reply]


    Fred
    November 26th, 2008

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