 Geotag your digital photos
Explore your image collection in new ways with geotagging softwareby Ben Long, Macworld.com Your digital camera is a diligent archivist. Each time it captures an image, it records the time the photo was taken as well as the settings that were used—details you can use later to help track down the photo in your collection. For most of us, though, it’s easier to remember where we took a picture than to remember when. However, most digital cameras don’t possess this sort of location awareness. Two exceptions include the $500 Nikon Coolpix P6000 and the iPhone 3G(or the original iPhone with the 2.0 software update). For photos taken with other cameras, you can easily embed the coordinates after the fact through a process called geotagging. Geotagged images provide you with a new way of sorting and organizing your photos. For example, you can search for pictures shot in a particular locale or create an interactive map of your latest vacation showing not only where you went, but also images from points along the route.But before you can take advantage of any of these features, you have to tag your images with geographic information. Fortunately, there’s now a wide variety of Mac tools that can get the job done. Adding Geotags When you geotag an image, you’re simply storing latitude and longitude coordinates for that image in the file’s metadata. This means you’ll first need to get those coordinates.Using Google Earth One of the easiest ways to do this is with Google Earth, Google’s free, three-dimensional, navigable model of the globe. Simply download the software, use the search and navigation tools to locate the destination of your photo, then add a placemark (Add: Placemark) to get exact coordinates. You’ll also need a program that can insert those coordinates into your files. While there are lots of programs that do this, I prefer Stanton Software’s free Geotagger which works in conjunction with Google Earth. Once you’ve pinpointed a location in Google Earth, drag the photos you want to tag with those coordinates onto the Geotagger application icon. Geotagger will automatically launch, retrieve the latitude and longitude from the location you chose in Google, and embed it in the metadata of your images.
Original article by: Macworld.com. | 
