Geotagging: Where did I shoot that?
When I first learned of the idea of geotagging I was instantly blow away and incredibly excited. I started to research a couple of the products that offer Geotagging and saw that this was a very new market. However, as I looked more into it and reviewed my own photography I found I did not have much use for Geotagging. While I do a lot of on location shooting for my photo shoots I know all of these locations and could return to them very easily. If I were doing a lot more traveling with my photography I would find geotagging a great resource.
Several months later I still don’t have much use for Geotagging but my interest has returned. Mostly due to the most recent podcast over at PhotoNetCast and their interview with a couple representatives of ATP Electronics (with their Purple and White logo) and their product the ATP Photofinder. I listened intently to the interview about their product and its advantages over other geotagging devices. The big difference is the Photofinder comes with a dock unit that you plug your memory card into that reads the time info off of the pictures and automatically embeds the geotag to the picture without the need of a computer. I remained excited about the product until the issue of the RAW format came up.
The Photofinder does not support RAW pictures. I only shoot RAW so until changes are made I probably will not be using this product. The crew of Photonetcast did make some excellent comments about this issue and made some good suggestions that I hope the ATP people will take back with them. While the Photofinder does not work for me, Antonio Marques of Photonetcast who reviewed the device here found the GPS data was very accurate, including much more so than other geotaggers he had used.
Just because I don’t have a big need of geotagging doesn’t mean I don’t have a little tech geek in me so I checked out some of the other geotaggers out there. One of the first ones I looked at in my original research that came up again is the PhotoTrackr Pro. There are three versions of the PhotoTracker, a light version, Pro without Bluetooth and Pro with Bluetooth. The first thing that jumped out at me was the support for all camera models 
as well as the RAW image format. Instead of a separate dock like the Photofinder the PhotoTrackr requires you to import your images and the GPS log data into their PhotoTrackr software. This is a step some users might not be as comfortable with but with all the goodies in the program I would probably enjoy this software. Using the software you can pinpoint the locations of your pictures on a map and even play back your trip through the map or through a slide-show. The software also has integration with Flickr for easy uploading.
The key to the PhotoTrackr is the ability to have more control to how your GPS data is saved. After you import the pictures and the GPS log you can choose to embed the data in the picture files or export it to a separate file. I’m not sure if this would work like a sidecar file but it certainly is a step in the right direction.
Apparently GPS trackers are gaining in popularity as I found in my RSS feed from Digital Photography School a review of the Columbus V-900 GPS Data Logger written by Peter Carey. The review gives a nice description of the use of and features of this GPS tracker. The immediate advantage I see of this device is the units voice recording option. Check out his review for some a great walk-through of the device.
As the devices advance I think more and more people will begin to use GPS tracking. Some point and shoot cameras that are coming out have GPS built in but it may be a little while before this feature is built into professional DSLR’s. Personally I would use it if I had one, but right now it wouldn’t really help my photography. Maybe in the future if I start to do more traveling, but for now I’ll just be looking.
