But the rudimentary geotagging support in Adobe Systems' Lightroom and Apple's Mac OS X 10.5, which both can show a photo's location on a map, is a harbinger of things to come.Geotagger "Solmeta N2" for the Nikon D5000 DSLR Mostly that's limited today just to utilities to marry geographic data with image files. I'm certain that these sites will improve as geotagging photos in the first place gets easier, more people try it, and programmers hammer away at the computational and user-interface challenges.Īnother area with potential is software to deal with geotagging on computers. In the months that I've been trying this out, though, geotagging has been improving. Also, when I inadvertently uploaded the wrong day's track log for a batch of photos, I had a hard time figuring out my error. I found Everytrail's interface a bit difficult and unintuitive at times, but it does have the advantage of being able to piggyback on Flickr: I successfully imported my bike trip Flickr set into an Everytrail map-though the klunkiness of the process was evident by the fact that I have three copies of each photo, and I can't figure out how to get rid of the duplicates. Locr shows individual photos fine, but doesn't handle groups with much aplomb. And I can't help thinking when I see sites like Locr, though, that it must be tough building a critical mass of members when there are bigger photo-sharing sites already with major momentum. That makes for a nicer slideshow than SmugMug's thumbnails, but there's not too much of a sense of place to it. Like SmugMug, it's got a slideshow ability, though its photos are large and its map, a strip on the left edge with pushpin locations, is more an afterthought. Like Panoramio, Locr, a German company, lets you upload your own photos. likewise is an entertaining way to browse geotagged photos it's a glitzy interface built on top of Flickr photos and Google Maps. Google's Panoramio has a reasonable approach to virtual tourism if not necessarily the best interface for storing your photos-it seems like a ripe candidate for some integration with Picasa. There are some other options out there that deserve a look. I'm glad the Organizr lets me change this setting, but why isn't there a geoprivacy option in a photo's privacy settings window or in the map that's shown when you click the photo? Happily, Flickr lets you set the geoprivacy of each image, though doing so is awkward. But there's no question in my mind that the feature imparts a sense of traveling through a place, a sensation that regular slideshows completely lack. And for slideshows, thumbnails are hardly the best way to showcase sweeping vistas. It's a bit rough around the edges-I'm guessing because the technical difficulties of combining external Google Maps data with its own thumbnails-so it can be herky-jerky at times and with missing map elements. With this ability, the site automatically shows a gallery's sequence of photos, displaying thumbnails along the way on a map and a red line connecting them. SmugMug, though, has what I found to be the slickest geotagging feature out there: fly-through slideshows of a gallery. Indeed, it's probably the most likely way somebody might want to use a map to show off pictures of a recent trip, for example. (Google Maps can show Picasa images of a particular area to Google account holders who install a Mapplet application, though.)įlickr also lets you take a set-based view of a map, with a scattering of pink dots representing your pictures. In contrast, Picasa and SmugMug draw maps that only reflect the contents of a particular group of photos-called galleries at SmugMug, albums at Picasa, and sets at Flickr.
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