Geotagging Your Photos
July 9, 2009 by Mike Nally
Filed under Featured
I am, and this hurts to admit, an old school photographer.
I learned the craft of photography back when we had actual film in the cameras and needed to spend hours in pitch black rooms with less than pleasant chemicals to produce one or two decent photos from a days effort in the field. There was no Photoshop, Lightroom, or Aperture software to save the day when an exposure went wrong or the colors were not saturated. We got what we shot and did what we could with it in the wet darkroom.
But I, like nearly everyone else, have embraced digital photography both because of the power it provides and because there is rapidly becoming no other choice. I get digital. I understand digital. I see the advantages even though I miss the quality film provides.
This is a nice shot of an old growth tree covered in Spanish moss. I'd love to shoot it again but I honestly cannot remember where it is exactly. Hello geotagging!
One particular dimension of digital photography does have me excited over the classic film cameras. Geotagging. Frankly, I don’t understand why more people aren’t taking the feature more seriously. Why don’t more people see the power of being able to pinpoint within a few yards where each photo they’ve recorded was captured? If nothing else it opens up a world of possibilities when sorting through image collections or marketing your pictures.
Once upon a time, if I spend the day shooting photos at a local nature preserve, it was more than enough information to write down in some sort of paper journal the general location and conditions of the shoot in a simple notebook.
As recently as just a year ago I didn’t believe in the power of geotagging either. How often is anyone going to care about the exact position I was in at the park that resulted in my particular image? And, from a business perspective, do I actually want to give people access to that data?
But I came to realize that having that exact information has a ton of power both for the casual photographer as well as the professional. Simply being able to search through your thousands of images for, say, “Orlando” will quickly pull together a lifetime of family vacation photos. And, if you want to sell your photos, how powerful is it to be able to have your images tagged not just with “Yosemite Valley”, but with a specific location that an art director who’s in the know might just be looking for?
Geotagging your images. It sounds like a toy. It’s really a powerful tool.
