How to quickly geotag all your photos on both PC and Mac

Geotagging is a relatively new practice that will play a huge role in digital photography in the near future.  While newer cameras and mobile devices will have geotagging capabilities built in, how can you quickly and easily tag the rest of the photos in your collection?

The process is actually quit simple, you just need the right software, know-how and enough time- especially if you have a large collection.  To get started, the best software available for this is Google Picassa.  It has geotagging capabilities built-in and the process is very streamlined.  In addition to Picassa, you need Google Earth as well- this is where you’ll get the location information for your photos.

First, open up Picassa and choose the image you’d like to geotag.  In the photo tray, click the “Geotag” button which will open up Google Earth automatically with Picassa as a small secondary window in the lower-right-hand corner.  Using Google Earth, navigate to the location the photo was taken, zoom way in if necessary to pin-point the location to the best of your memory, and place the yellow cross-hairs on your chosen spot.

Click the “Geotag” button to associate that location with your image.  Additionally, you can select multiple images in Picassa before geotagging to associate one location with several photos- good for weddings, vacations, etc.  Once you’ve tagged all your photos, click done and exit Google Earth.  When prompted, be sure to select “yes” to save the geotagged locations in your “My Places” folder.  This will make it easy to access your geotagged photos directly in Google Earth in the future.

During this process, Picassa will add the location data to the photos internal metadata in the form of EXIF GPS metadata, which is nothing more than the latitude and longitude.  Still, Picassa and Google Earth do all the hard work for you.  Now it’s just a matter of tagging all of those photos in your collection by hand, whether it’s 200 or 20,000.  In the future, this geotag metadata will automatically be placed in every digital image taken.

If you’re using a Mac, the process is relatively the same with some minor exclusions.  Since Picassa for Mac doesn’t offer this functionality, you have to use Google Earth with a program called “Geotagger.”  The easiest way to geotag your photos this way is to place the Geotagger icon in your doc, open Google Earth and position the coordinates over the location of your photo, then drag the photo you want to tag into the Geotagger icon in your doc.  This will add the location data as metadata the same way Picassa does it on PCs.

The biggest advantage to geotagging these days are the social networking aspects, but many more will come down the pipes in the near future.  As the devices and cameras catch up with the technology, which means GPS functionality will become part of every camera, geotagging will become commonplace and will unlock a whole new phase in what can be done with digital photography.

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