Life is grand

While Flickr and other sites have supported geo-tagging for awhile now I have to admit I just can’t be arsed. Without an automatic system I’m not going to dick around with dragging photos onto maps or cutting and pasting lat and long. I always give my photos a textual location description (e.g. “Ireland, co. Waterford, Aglish, The Stables” would be where I am right now) which suffices for most cases. But I do wish for a seamless location system for my photos. Twenty years from now I’d love to look back at my photo history and get a location history out of it.

A camera with GPS built-in is pretty much ideal but there aren’t many cameras like that and I already have a handful of cameras without GPS. So companies like Sony made separate GPS devices that use time and date to sync with your photos. You can use any camera so long as it has the same time and date on it that the GPS unit does. Brilliant idea and I reckon better than embedding it in the camera. Unfortunately being Sony they decided to make the software tortorous. You have to run all your photos through their software. I’d rather rinse my eyes in vinegar.

Thankfully there is something that is close to perfect; the ATP GPS Photo Finder. You carry it around and like the Sony it correlates time and date of locations to time and date of your photos. But instead of forcing you to download your photos to a computer and run it through software you just pop your camera’s memory card into the device and it embeds locations into the files. You can then do your usual process with your files.

Simple but marvelous idea. The only fly in the ointment is that it only supports JPEG files. So it will ignore your Canon and Nikon RAW files. Hopefully they get that sorted soon though. I’ll happily geo-tag all my photos then.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 16th, 2008 at 11:19 pm and is filed under Post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.