Geotagging just got easier
9 08 2006Thanks to a new bookmarklet from Sumaato the geotagging of your flickr photos just became a lot easier.
First things first, if you don’t know what I mean by geotagging check my earlier posting.
After you have figured out what goetagging is and you have your photos uploaded to flickr then visit http://labs.sumaato.net/tools/flickr_geocode_bookmarklet/ and drag the bookmarklet onto your browsers toolbar.
The next step is to view the photo in flickr that you wish to geotag, once loaded click on the bookmarklet. A google map appears alongside your photo, navigate and zoom into the place the photo was taken, once you have pinpointed the location click on the correct part of the map and then select SAVE LOCATION.
The bookmarklet now automatically tags your photo with the lon & lat co-ords as well as adding a link to the location in google maps within the photo description.
Give it a go and let me know what you think.
Nice gizmo. There are other solutions too, like GMiF, that accomplish this along with the various bells and whistles that you’d expect. Trouble is, you need a Flickr account to be able to tag the photos rather than the photo itself containing the geo information. I blogged about just this topic here.
I’ve been playing with Robogeo (I’ll blogpost about it when I’ve taken a few more photos), a gizmo that compares the timestamps between a GPS track and the exif data on photos, and matches them up. It’ll then write the lat and long data to the photo’s exif tags. The pics are then useful to things other than just Flickr - you can create ESRI shapefiles (for use in GIS apps), export to flickr without having to position the pics on a map, export to Google Earth (now THAT’s fun, seeing your tracklog on a GE map) - all kinds of stuff.
The point is that the geo info is embedded in the pic, not just on flickr.
Now I’m off to try the Sumaato bookmarklet cos it looks dead handy too. Thanks for the heads-up!