The Unlawyer

Wouldn’t it be great if your digital camera could automatically remember where you took that picture? Taking pictures in or of famous landmarks poses hardly any identification problems but what about photos taken in unfamiliar terrain, and the picture does not contain any helpful marks? What if you’ve forgotten where? I’m not the first one to wonder aloud regarding the addition of a Global Positioning System (GPS) radio to a digicam – in my opinion, a really useful feature.

So, has geotagging for digital pictures finally come of age and become fully automated to boot?

“Geo-tagging—associating a photo to a geographic location—is getting a lot of buzz in the photo industry, and cameras are just now beginning to show off its uses for digital photos. ATP showcased its Photo Finder at CES, and today at PMA, NXP software and its subsidiary, Geotate, unveiled software of their own.”

Aside from helping a photographer identify where he took his pictures, geotags can also be shared via photo sharing websites like Picasa and Flickr. Ordinarily, geographic coordinates are typically obtained using a separate handheld GPS receiver and with the user manually encoding the captured information. An advanced option is the use of specialized GPS radios – the Sony GPS-CS1 and the GPS-CS1KA come to mind – that work in the following manner:

“To arrange your pictures geographically, import the logged data from the GPS device, using the supplied USB cable, and then download the digital images to a computer. The supplied GPS Image Tracker software synchronizes the images on your digital camera with the latitude, longitude and time readings from the GPS-CS1 device.”

As desirable as a digital camera with built-in GPS may be, there are some drawbacks, all of them peculiar to GPS itself. For starters, a GPS radio must have a clear line-of-sight on at least four of the orbiting GPS satellites overhead in order to obtain a useful location fix. Not a problem if one is taklng taking pictures in the great outdoors but capturing usable signals becomes difficult in built-up urban areas like Hong Kong. Next, it takes a bit of time for the GPS radio to obtain a decent fix. Last, GPS radios are notorious battery hogs, especially when having difficulty locking on to a GPS satellite, and can quickly discharge a digicam’s batteries.

GE and Altek’s digicam incorporates a sort-of GPS radio, in combination with proprietary software installed in a user’s computer, in order to bypass these known limitations of GPS, and it works something like this:

“… [E]very time the shutter is triggered, the camera’s memory card briefly captures the raw data from the GPS radio, associating it with each photo. Then, once the pictures have been imported into Geotate’s proprietary client, auxiliary location data is downloaded from a central server, which is then synthesized with the camera data using local resources to establish actual coordinates. What’s more, the Geotate software hooks in to Wikipedia as well as the popular mapping and photo-sharing services, giving you real-world information about your shots while also allowing you to map them out and upload to Flickr, Picasa, and friends.”

This device is planned as a standard feature in certain point-and-shoot digital camera models, as well as a hot shoe accessory on DSLRs. Neat.