foolography

Why Geotagging? What’s it good for? Who needs location data in their photos? - These questions keep coming up wherever anyone talks about geotagging. They’ll be answered here.

Photo archives are getting bigger and bigger, even personal collections are often already so large, that finding your photos seems impossible, unless you are a very organized person and have a beautifully sorted archive. The only way is usually to try to remember when you took the photo you are looking for and then browse through the photos that match the date that you remember. Just imagine you could sort your files by location, just as you can sort them by date. Or one step further - what if you could search by location? Well, that’s exactly what geotagging enables you to do. It adds another vital piece of data to the photo’s metadata. Metadata is data that describes the actual data. Unlike with text documents, it is not yet possible to search photos by their actual content, so the metadata is the only information available for searching. For most photos, the most important metadata is where the photo was taken, and when it was taken. The timestamp has been available almost from the beginning of digital photography and now geotagging gives you the position as well.

So much for the theoretical part. Check out the use cases to get a better idea, how valuable geotagging can be in specific applications.

As I get feedback from customers, content will be added to the now empty testimonials page.

I have started two howtos for using panoramio and flickr to display your geotagged photos. This section will also be expanded in the near future