I have been longing for GPS integration in cameras for a long time. I thought that there would be many possibilities with this feature such as integration with Google maps, or Google earth or various other things. And then recently I found that some people allready where tagging there photos with GPS coordinates, exactly for the purpose of doing these cool integrations as I had been longing for.
High on life I started to investigate how the easy way to do this was, and I quickly found this cool web application for the purpose of tagging ones flickr photos. Afterwards they can be viewed in the self same application, or via google earth. It seems like this is quite a new trend (a year or so), and different people are developing new ways of watching and tagging all these photos, all the time. Some nice ways of watching is via this google earth network link (kml file), or via maps.yuan.cc. You can see my pictures which I geotagged here, or by searching in the previous mentioned applications.
For now the links between these applications are only hold by private users. But maybe someday in the near future there will be a yahoo or/and google funded connection between them. That way it would be more credible, and attractive for the masses. The tagging procedure at the moment is quite timeconsuming. So the best thing would surely be GPS in the camera.
The next thing I want is pitch, roll and yaw in the tag. But it will take me some time to determine these angles, and at the moment I am not sure what to use it for. I AM sure though, that it will prove itself useful somehow.
- – Update 2005-05-02 – -
I have made a small map application, thanks to the google map api. The map shows my geotagged images from flickr. It still has some issues in IE, but in firefox it is pretty ok. Check it.