As a follow up to our recent post on Geotagging images and review of the Jobo PhotoGPS device I thought it’d be interesting to see how many of our readers actually do it.
Feel free to expand upon your vote in comments below.
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44 Responses to “Have You Ever Geotagged an Image? [POLL]” - Add Yours
May 29th, 2009 at 7:57 am
I geotag using Flickr’s interface, which is only a small subset of photos that I take. I’ve been looking at better options for a while, but only haphazardly. I’d love to have some way to automatically tag everything that comes from my Nikon D40 and my Sony point-and-shoot, and have an easy way to collect information for film photos. My best bet seems to be a bluetooth GPS device to work with my mobile phone and a notepad for timestamping film. My inner geek wants a better option, though.
May 29th, 2009 at 8:02 am
Not in the image-data itself but in flickr. The flickr geotagging module is nice and easy to use.
May 29th, 2009 at 8:35 am
I use a separate GPS logger (very, very little), then I matche the poto Exif time with the GPS tracklog, et voilà…
May 29th, 2009 at 8:42 am
Yes… through my Sony GPS-CS1 …
May 29th, 2009 at 9:09 am
This poll could use another option: “Yes – I tag most [nearly all] of my images”
I use HoudahGeo to tag nearly all of my images. Flickr picks up on the tagging nicely. The content of the image dictates whether I make Flickr’s tagging (location) information public.
May 29th, 2009 at 9:13 am
I mainly Geotag my nature shots on Flickr. I live near a wildlife area with a lot of migratory song birds and figure that people might want to know where the shots came from.
May 29th, 2009 at 9:14 am
I would if it was easier. I shoot raw and film a lot, and it seems it would require too much work on my side.
May 29th, 2009 at 9:28 am
I geotag all my photos (with the exception of ones taken at places i would rather keep private). I do all my tagging from within Flickr since it’s so easy to use.
May 29th, 2009 at 9:53 am
I tag most of my images using a freeware program called Geosetter. I can download the track log from my GPS unit and open the log in the program. Takes a little work but is not hard. I like to tag because most of my images are shot while hiking or backpacking.
May 29th, 2009 at 10:04 am
I geotag all my travel photos via Flickr and if I’m out on my mtb, I geotag my photos with my Nokia 6110 GPS phone as it tracks my ride and I can link this back to the time the photo was taken using Locr software.
May 29th, 2009 at 10:23 am
I do it occasionally, and I’d do it all the time if Canon didn’t produce such a half-assed system. I don’t tag much because of the post-processing it requires. If the coords could be embedded at time of capture, that would be so much easier. Unfortunately Canon have a really clunky system that requires not only the wireless grip, but also an external GPS. Talk about cables and bulk. Where is the Canon equivalent of the Nikon GP1 to embed when the shutter clicks. Once it is integrated like that we’ll see a whole heap more people geotagging.
May 29th, 2009 at 10:24 am
Same as Derek. All my photos are geotagged on Flickr. But it’s mostly for search purposes, another way for people to find my works..
May 29th, 2009 at 11:00 am
I geotag all my images on Flickr (with maybe a couple of rare exceptions). I try to put location data in the EXIF/IPTC data on my images, but I don’t always have time for that.
I regard the time and date of the image as an important context information for the image. I don’t know if many people look at it, but I do know that some search sites do.
May 29th, 2009 at 11:17 am
Never done geotagging but I would if it were built into camera.
May 29th, 2009 at 11:27 am
I try to geotag any that would benefit from it. Mostly ones I put up on either flickr or my picasa web albums. On the computer I label the folder with the year_month_day and location or event.
May 29th, 2009 at 11:44 am
I mod a tourism development group on Flickr (the group is covered by a CC Attribution license to give economic development people, hotel owners, etc. an image pool to draw from to promote the county) and the images I upload to that group are pretty much the only ones I geotag. But I’m thinking about starting to tag all of my landscapes, for some of the reasons other folks have cited above.
May 29th, 2009 at 11:55 am
All of my pictures, yeah! :)
May 29th, 2009 at 12:13 pm
I geotag every photo with the exception of those taken at my home or friends’ houses.
May 29th, 2009 at 12:21 pm
i routinely geotag my landscape / cityscape / architecture shots on flickr.
May 29th, 2009 at 1:22 pm
I occasionally geotag my photos, but I wish the process were a lot easier so that I could do it more. Hopefully the next batch of dSLR cameras will come with built-in GPS so that they can just embed the data as you shoot, instead of the semi-complicated process that you have to go through now.
May 29th, 2009 at 4:25 pm
I have geotagged images I posted on PBase.com. I don’t do it for local photography because that would be nuts but for those that I travel to, I will tag now and then.
May 29th, 2009 at 5:17 pm
I’ve recently started to geotag all my photos using my cellphone a gps bluetooth antenna and a software. Even if I quote Sandro: “the content of the image dictates whether I make Flickr’s tagging (location) information public.”
May 29th, 2009 at 5:29 pm
Yes, I do tag most of my images with a plugin for Adobe Lightroom. I have ready presets for places in my country, so I don’t have to search the map everytime.
May 29th, 2009 at 8:14 pm
Like many other, I use the flickr interface to tag images that are uploaded to that service. But I have considered buying GPS hardware to tag all my images.
May 29th, 2009 at 9:46 pm
Just wrote a tutorial on this last night. Here it is:
http://server.ericsbinaryworld.com/blog/2009/05/28/tutorial-geo-tagging-your-photos/
What a great coincidence!
May 29th, 2009 at 10:08 pm
I geotag whenever possible (when it makes sense, obviously, if I’m taking snapshots at my house I don’t geotag them, and I remove any geotags that exist if I’m publicly posting pictures where I wouldn’t want the world to know their location, i.e. a picture of my friend’s car parked in front of his house).
I use a Holux M-1000C GPS datalogger, which I can keep in a pocket or clipped to my camera strap. When I get back, I can download the data points, export them to GPX, then then use GeoSetter to tag the photos. The M-1000C also doubles as a Bluetooth GPS, so I can use it for navigation with my Blackberry (better accuracy than the in-phone GPS).
It’s always nice to be able to look at a picture at know exactly where you took it. It’s especially nice for vacation photos, since if can help you remember all of the places that you visited.
May 29th, 2009 at 10:56 pm
I use the SnapMyLife iPhone app which gives me the option of geotagging images while uploading them to the site. They have a twitter iPhone app where you can upload images to twitter that will have geotagging soon too.
May 30th, 2009 at 12:10 am
It took a long time to figure out a good process, but I’m glad I did. My GPS unit is always on my camera bag, and I flip it on as soon as I leave home. Right after downloading the photos to my computer, I use HoudahGeo to tag them. I love that I can just click on the GSP info in Lightroom 2 to take me to a map, and the info also transfers to Flickr.
May 30th, 2009 at 12:37 am
I geotag all of my images, it’s simple and requires no effort on my part. I have a GPS plugged directly into my D300 all of the time. The GPS data is recorded into the exif when the picture is taken.
May 30th, 2009 at 1:06 am
I geotag all my shoots since ive bought Custom Idea’s GEOPIC II :)
May 30th, 2009 at 2:49 am
i think if i took more landscapes i would do it, but with portraits, i just see it as a potential invasion of privacy.
May 30th, 2009 at 3:58 am
Yep! I try to geotag everything every time I travel.
Sony GPS-CS1 and GPicSync (from Google Code) seem to work quite well.
thinking about getting the new sony unit since you can see the time & set it without needing a computer.
I upload everything to flickr, then it’s interesting seeing where those shots were taken.
May 30th, 2009 at 5:22 am
Sometimes i don’t want other people to know where I took my shots. Only if it would be somehow useful. Like pics of Landmarks or landscapes or cityscapes. I don’t want to broadcast to flickr or other sites where i took pictures of my house or family or macro photography. A geo-tag for those images would be useless.
May 30th, 2009 at 8:31 am
I use a Lightroom plugin by Jeffrey Friedl for geoencoding all my images from a gps track: List of Lightroom plugins. I then check the location for individual photos in Google maps. If slightly out, I can re-center the map on the correct location, copy the new link to the clipboard, and paste it back into the plugin.
Ideally, I would like the program to fill in the IPTC information and keywords from the geolocation, or, if the information is not available, to share what I type in onto a common server. This would be a fantastic resource for location photographers, and very educational – e.g. I’d love to know all the names of the trees in my photos.
June 2nd, 2009 at 4:32 pm
I use the GPS module of my iPhone 3G to geotag the photos taken with my Nikon D80. I found an app that makes this really simple (especially for Mac or Flickr users). The overhead is minimal. I just have to turn “geologging” on before I start taking photos and afterwards the app geotags the photos on my Mac. I use Places in iPhoto ‘09 to see on a map where a photo is taken.
The app only costs $5, more info here.
June 2nd, 2009 at 11:59 pm
While I have a D200 that natively supports a GPS, I find I’d rather toss my Garmin Colorado in my backpack and use Robogeo to merge the location information into the EXIF later. The GPS solution for the D200 tends to have too many cables and doing something like using the hotshoe to mount my GPS means I won’t be using my hotshoe for flashes or commander units.
Lightroom has excellent support for geotagged images as well.
June 3rd, 2009 at 4:34 am
One of the answers doesn’t make sense. If the question is Have you ever… How can the answer be no I have never but I used to?
I think it would be easier to change the question to do you geotag your images?
June 5th, 2009 at 2:12 am
I carry a Garmin GPS with me whenever I’m in the bush taking photographs. When I get home I use gpicsync to automatically update all the images with position data. Gpicsync will also create a nice Google Earth file that shows your GPS track and places clickable image thumbnails and the location that each image was shot at.
Gpicsync
http://code.google.com/p/gpicsync/
GPSBabel
http://www.gpsbabel.org/
June 5th, 2009 at 2:19 am
I use a very useful program, Panorado Flyer. You can search for the location on Google Earth, drag it to the center of the map window, then you right-click on a JPEG image within the Windows Explorer to bring up the context menu, then select “Panorado Flyer”, and then a submenu command “Get location from Google Earth”. Very easy to do.
http://www.panorado.com/en/index.php
June 5th, 2009 at 4:27 am
I took a ton of shots on a trip to Tetons/Yellowstone. When I got back I realized I had no idea which waterfall was which, etc. I decided to geotag next trip, so I bought a Garmin 60CSx that I could use for hiking as well as geotagging. 2 cables and 2 map packages later it was ready to go. Next trip (Yosemite) I knew where I was all of the time, and all of the pictures were repeatable. I could look at a shot on my MacBook in the evening and go back to reshoot it in the morning if I thought I could improve it. I uploaded some to Flickr, but that pretty much seems to be a waste of time except for the convenience of having landmarks. The whole deal cost me over $700, but at least I have a GPS that I use a lot of time, even walking around the city, and it’s a great safety device (along with a backup compass and map) for going out in the wilderness.
June 5th, 2009 at 4:32 am
Hi Darren,
Here’s proof newbies read your stuff.
Question – What is geotagging?
Sounds like the use of a geopositioner of some sort to locate the exact position of where a shot was taken.
But what is it really?
Best,
Ed
P.S. If it is a positioning idea, why in heaven’s name would anyone ever need it except in emergency rescue, research and similar work?
June 5th, 2009 at 8:35 am
The only time I would consider geotagging is if I found a specific view or item I wanted to note for my personal information. However, I have a good memory, and usually dont need to bring my GPS, and if I’m in the woods in the hills, I dont get good satalite signal anyway.
June 5th, 2009 at 2:00 pm
I bougth the interface cable for my Garmin to Nikon camera some years ago but more recently bought a Di-GPS unit which does the job much more easily… less cables.. a short cable connects to the 10 pin socket and the unit either attaches to the camera strap or slides into the flash mount.
June 6th, 2009 at 4:54 pm
I just recently started using Microsoft’s free Pro Photo Tools to geotag some of my images.
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