Wouldn’t it be nice to know exactly where your picture was taken along with when it was taken? I have mentioned this to a handful of friends, and its not that its an entirely novel idea, but I would love a camera with built-in GPS. It seems that they can make cell phones and all sorts of other GPS enabled devices, but why aren’t more cameras GPS enabled?
There are a number of useful applications that can come from this small amount of captured data, but here are a few that come to my mind:
- Keeping track of the route of a trip. Lets say you go from Rome, to Florence, to Naples, to Capri, etc… Having GPS and time, you can know the path you traveled.
- Being able to categorize pictures by location. Lets say every time you were at home taking pictures or at a venue.
- When sharing pictures, you can quickly compare pictures with other friends where your pictures were taken.
- On Google, when searching for images, if they were geotagged, it would be incredibly easy to find pictures that were taken in a certain city, landmark, etc.
- Picasa and Google Earth (and I think Flikr too) already will plot your pictures on a map.
- Helping you recall where you went on a certain drunken night.
But imagine publicly sharing your pictures that were geotagged from a party at your house and for some total stranger to figure view them and find out where you live… Not as much fun in that light.
Here is a story that provides some info on GPS and digital cameras.
One really cool thing that is a good immediately accessible solution is a GPS device that will capture your GPS position at an interval. You just carry this around with you and then later you can use software provided with the GPS device associate your photos with where you have been. That would most definitely do the trick. And the gps tracking device is only 2oz. Unfortunately, the battery life of this device is between 10-14 hours… But it should do the trick. Here is the device: http://www.dpreview.com/news/0608/06080202sonygpscs1.asp
