Do you geotag your photos?

[Mohamed Ellozy]

Title says it all!

Please vote "never" if you know what geotagging is but don't use it, and vote "What is geotagging" if you don't know what it is.

If you do geotag I would like to hear about what tools you use, and what use you make of it.

 

[Mohamed Ellozy]

I use GPicSync almost always, and use Picassa desktop plus Google Earth when I did not have my GPSr with me and know exactly where I took a photo.

 

[MichaelJ]

For most tagging I will simply import the track into Aperture (which I use for all my photos). It will import either a GPX file or a text file of NMEA signatures, I don't need to do any translation. Aperture does it all for me, and when I export an album of JPEG's, it includes the GPS coordinates in the EXIF data of each image.

If there's a special situation, or I need to be wicked precise (Aperture is only accurate to the minute), I will use GPSBabel first to create GPX from NMEA, then use GPS PhotoLinker to tag the photos, then finally import into Aperture.

I publish my photos using Gallery, which has a Google Map/Earth plugin. I click "Show in Google Earth" and get a nice .KMZ file that drops a pin on every photo location along with a popup showing a thumbnail of the photo and its caption. Click on that and it takes you directly to the gallery page online. Into that .KMZ I import my GPX track, then I give that resulting .KMZ file to family and friends. I don't do this too often, usually I just import the GPX track into Google Earth and get some nice 3-D images, which I save and then publish with my photos.

 

[Raymond]

This is something the camera records automatically? Or do you figure it out later from a map or take a picture of the relevant page of your GPS at the same location as each photo and enter it in manually, or what?

 

[MichaelJ]

Geotagging, the quick and dirty explanation:

The camera records the time/date you took the photo in a section of the .JPG file called the "EXIF info". You'll see other information in there as well, such as aperture, shutter speed, etc.

Meanwhile, you carry a GPS and record a track log, often in a file format called .GPX (though there are others).

If your camera's clock is accurate*, then it's a trivial matter for a piece of computer software to read the time out of the photo, then buzz through the track log to determine where you were at that time, then save those coordinates into the EXIF info. This is the actual act of geotagging.

Finally, a number of different photo websites will then read that data when showing you the photos and build a map for you.



*When I really want to be sure, I take a photo of the display on the GPS, then I know the exact time discrepancy between the camera and the GPS and can adjust for it when tagging the photos.

 

[Chip]

My new Canon S100 has the built in GPS for tagging photos. Don't know how accurate it is, but I've decided not to use. I know where I was and there's some pics I take that I might not want someone else to know exactly where I was (I'm assuming it's easy to see in pic's properties).

 

[Mohamed Ellozy]

... there's some pics I take that I might not want someone else to know exactly where I was (I'm assuming it's easy to see in pic's properties).

With Picassa desktop it is easy to remove the geotagging information on selected photos.

 

[DougPaul]

With Picassa desktop it is easy to remove the geotagging information on selected photos.

You can remove and edit essentially any or all of the EXIF data from a photo with the proper tools (eg ExifTool: http://owl.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/ ). You can also add arbitrary text, such as copyright notices.

Doug

 

[JohnL]

Never. No inclination or need to do so.

JohnL

 

[sardog1]

I know where I was and there's some pics I take that I might not want someone else to know exactly where I was (I'm assuming it's easy to see in pic's properties).

Yup, it's why I "generally" don't tag location with my iPhone photos, or pics loaded through a laptop, if I'm sharing while on the go. No desire to advertise to the world that I'm not at home at the moment, however picky I am about the crowd I share with: "Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare: Tools of the modern burglar?".

 

[DougPaul]

Yup, it's why I "generally" don't tag location with my iPhone photos, or pics loaded through a laptop, if I'm sharing while on the go. No desire to advertise to the world that I'm not at home at the moment, however picky I am about the crowd I share with: "Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare: Tools of the modern burglar?".

You should be able to remove the geotags with tools such as exiftool (http://owl.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/), however if you don't tag the pics in the first place, you don't have to worry about them slipping through.

Perhaps one of the tagging programs can output the tags to a logfile rather than the image file. (I have no idea if any have this capability, but it could be useful.)

Doug

 

[sardog1]

You should be able to remove the geotags with tools such as exiftool (http://owl.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/))

Doug

My go-to graphics app, GraphicConverter, has this capability. Don't know whether Aperture does -- my wife uses that far more proficiently than I do -- but I suspect it might as well.