Inert Detritus The Internet's dust bunnies

Geotagging and Fuzzy Locations

I’ve been look­ing at geo­t­ag­ging more of my pho­tos late­ly, either by hand after the fact, or auto­mat­i­cal­ly with the help of ded­i­cat­ed hard­ware. I’ve found a lot of links so far for hard­ware, but I haven’t found exact­ly what I’m look­ing for.

In the mean­time, I’ve been tag­ging a few on Flickr, but am increas­ing­ly dis­pleased with their approach: it’s all or noth­ing. You either don’t tag your pho­to at all, or you give it an exact lon­gi­tude and latitude.

I don’t have the patience or mem­o­ry to tag the exact loca­tion for every sin­gle pho­to, but I feel like drop­ping 50 pho­tos on a pin where they obvi­ous­ly aren’t from is doing more harm than good. I’d love to grab the pho­tos, define a cir­cle on the map, and say, “these pho­tos were all tak­en some­where inside here.”

I real­ize the EXIF tag­ging for­mat prob­a­bly does­n’t sup­port “fuzzy loca­tions”, but it would be a great option to have.

Alter­na­tive solution:

1. A cam­era with a stan­dard port for plug­ging a GPS unit into.
2. A stan­dard pro­to­col for GPS units to talk to cameras.
3. GPS units that sup­port this port and protocol.

Absolute­ly. I saw this linked recent­ly, and it seems like a light-years-ahead solu­tion to a sep­a­rate GPS receiv­er or some­thing teth­ered to a grip that pro­vides data over the USB port.

But in the mean­time, I’d love to fuzzi­ly define the loca­tions of pho­tos I took. Entire sets I took while at Vir­ginia Tech can be defined as some­where inside the town limits.

Cor­rec­tion: the pho­toG­PS is still a “cap­ture sep­a­rate­ly, inte­grate into pho­to tags lat­er” solution.

The EXIF tag­ging for­mat does almost sup­port a fuzzy loca­tion, in the form of GPS degree-of-pre­ci­sion. I say “almost” because this isn’t quite an accu­ra­cy (as in ±meters) but sort of a mul­ti­pli­er on what­ev­er accu­ra­cy your GPS+surroundings+atmosphere was capa­ble of. I’m not sure how/if sites like Flickr use that info. You could alter­na­tive­ly add IPTC data to your pho­to, which can include things like City/Province/Nation.

Shame­less plug: We are in late alpha on a new Mac geo­t­ag­ging app we’re pret­ty excit­ed about. The accu­ra­cy stuff has a few miss­ing links as of today, and no reverse geocod­ing yet for that IPTC alter­na­tive, but we’d love to let you try it out and send us feed­back where it falls short against your needs. Email me or d/@natevw on twit­ter if you’re interested!