The next hot thing of Digital Photography :: Geotagging
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The days of low megapixel cameras seem to be behind us. Buying a very good digital camera nowadays is not too hard, nor it is much of a hit on a wallet. You do not even need to spend thousands on those Digital SLR cameras to get high quality images like the pros do; Nikon D40, D40x and the newly announced Nikon D60 are all in under-a-grand range.
So what’s next? Megapixels are abundant, most cameras, even smaller point-and-shoot ones, have good optics these days. The keyword of the year, at least among those who like to take a lot of pictures, will be Geotagging!
Geotagging, sometimes referred to as Geocoding, is the process of adding geographical identification metadata to various media such as websites, RSS feeds, or images and is a form of geospatial metadata. This data usually consists of latitude and longitude coordinates, though it can also include altitude, bearing, and place names.
In plain English, you take pictures as you usually do, you come home, upload them to your computer, but besides just having the pictures - you can now have locations associated with each picture. This makes it awesome since you can view your pictures on the map and see exactly where you’ve been. There are services and sites on-line, like Flickr.com, which let you upload your pictures and browse them in this cool and innovative way. But how do you geotag?
This is done through some sort of GPS device integration. Some newer cameras are coming with GPS integrated, and, as expected, there are ways to go around this for us who already have cameras. Meet the currently popular bunch and expect to see more devices throughout the year:
Sony’s GPS-CS1KASP, is a cool way of adding the new functionality to your digital camera OR camcorder.
To arrange your pictures geographically, you import the logged data from this device via USB cable and using Sony’s GPS Image Tracker software you synchronize your digital images with the longitude and latitude recorded by the device. It should be available in February for around $150 bucks.
- via: http://www.letsgodigital.org/en/18232/sony-gps-receiver/
Another device, great for those with cameras which sport a hot-shoe adaptor capabilities (usually used for attaching the external flash, or similar devices) comes from Jobo, for a cool $149 bucks. It works similar to the Sony’s GPS unit above, meaning - it does not update your pictures directly, but rather, you sync your pictures and the GPS device afterwards. Cool thing about this one is that it does not just sync your GPS data to pictures - but Place names as well!
- via: Gizmodo
Note that this is new technology, and no-one still has the best solution out there, except, maybe, those high end cameras from Nikon (D300) and Canon (EOS 40D and EOS 1Ds Mark III).
There are of course cameras which have this technology integrated. One of them are, the not-so-great GE’s E1050 10.1Mpix Point-n-Shoot camera ($249).
One problem with geotaggers, which attach to the camera directly, is that they drain the battery faster. A cool approach, taken in GE’s E1050, and which should soon be available from GeoTate as a hot-shoe adaptor, is that these are not true GPS devices. They seem to only have GPS Radio which collects data. There is no baseband chip which processes the data or fixes the location. All this is done by the software on your computer later on - which query’s the central server for the data which is then synthesized with the camera data using local resources to establish actual coordinates.
It’s definitely something cool, something that still needs some work until complete, something available right now for those early adopters, and something you Need to Know 
Cheers!
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