Geotagging will let you know where you took your pictures

Geotagging is a new word and it will start to be important in digital photography in the very near future. Geotagging is the process of attaching a tag to a digital photograph which tells you where you took a picture.

Not just all the technical details of how the picture was taken. Where, which you get from geotagging, is very different.

At the moment it is unlikely that you have this on your camera. But already available is Geotag, an open source program that allows you match date/time information from photos with location information from a GPS unit or from a map. That is a bit cumbersome because you need to have a GPS system with you or make some intelligent guesses. The program is at Geotag http://geotag.sourceforge.net/.

Geotag promises that even if you don’t own a GPS unit (or it wasn’t switched on when you took a picture) you can still give the photo a location. Geotag will show a default location on the map and you can drag the marker and zoom in to give the photo a location. This is a bit more awkward than using a GPS, but not too difficult. You can also enter location coordinates manually and save them to your photos.

This is but a first step. The next big thing is to have geotagging built in to your digital camera. It starts with digital phones with built in cameras.

Many smart phones, including Apple’s iPhone 3G and some BlackBerrys, can already geotag their photos. With these you can geotag all of your pictures.

New devices are already arriving that can ease the process towards geotagging. A memory card from a camera can be transferred to the ATP Photo Finder ($100), where the gadget’s software uses time stamps to automatically match photos with locale.

Then there is Eye-Fi Explore ($130). This 2-gigabyte memory card not only stores hundreds of photos but also stamps each with location data. The card isn’t always accurate and is mostly limited to metro areas because it depends on a database of wireless Internet access points instead of using the GPS satellites. But it is a step in the right direction.

Of course, with Geogtag you can manually add the information to your shots.

But in the very near future this feature will be coming to digital cameras. And once one has it — it will be at the higher end — it will only be a short while before it is an universal features.

For digital camera makers the name of the game is upgrade. The companies want you to upgrade to the next generation. And the next generation will have a form of geotagging built in.

Would it convince me to buy a given mobile phone or camera? It would be a very important selling point. And that will be true for a lot of buyers.

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