The next big thing in amateur photography will be geotagging. Its popularity has grown a lot since last year and it is a very useful tool. Geotagging ads GPS coordinates to EXIF metadata in digital photography.
Some expensive pro cameras already have a built-in geotagging device. But the advanced amateur solution nowadays is to use specific geotagging equipment, such as the Sony GPS-CS1 (sold for US$ 150) or the ATP PhotoFinder. What they do is sync your geographical locaition with the time the photos where taken. Obviously, for this to work, both camera and GPS have to be time synced and you have to be with the device when you take the pictures. You just plug the device in your PC, insert the memory card and the machine does the rest of the work.
There is also the manual way. You remember where the picture was taken, find the spot in Google Earth or Maps and insert the coordinates in the EXIF. I does help people who see the pictures locate themselves geographically, but that’s not all what geotagging is about. Advanced amateurs and pros sometimes simply get their car or hop on a bus to go to places just to find out new stuff to photograph (I know I love to do that) and after taking hundreds of pics, it’s almost impossible to remember all the places you’ve been to.
For those who want to share geotagged images, Panoramio is a way out. Here’s a useful list of geotagging websites and software. For those that use Picasa, here’s a nice tutorial.
It seem quite obvious that in a very near future all consumer cameras will have GPS geotagging devices and map and satellite services will be swarmed with pictures. Soon we’ll have internet enabled cameras with auto-upload and geotagging, so it’ll be cool to see stupid criminals unintentionally uploading pictures that pinpoint their homes. On the other hand, a lost camera might become a treasure map in wrong hands.
For those who like hacking equipment, this guy made a Nikon D200 geotagging hack with cheap parts. I don’t have the expertise to build such a machine, but acording to forums, it seems to work fine.
Geotagging is not exclusive for photography. Though I think its not available for videos yet (it would be cool to have geotagged paths of video shots), geoblogging is also an option. More at geobloggers.com.