Adding GPS data?

February 1, 2007 7:38 AM | Related Categories: gps,workflow

There are a lot of possibilities now for adding GPS data to images. Most cameras do not have builtin GPS functionality, and even if they did a lot of people will have legacy images. Should we consider adding GPS data to our images?

The co-ordinate data is stored in the EXIF image data and can be used in various ways, the obvious one being to create geographic representation of photo locations, probably with thumbnails and other info. Is this just a gadget, or is it really useful?

I think it will probably become a bit of both. Casual users will use it to add interest to their travel shots and websites. What about pros? I'm beginning to wonder if photo researchers will make more and more use of GPS information in finding images, and if online agencies will make it an important aspect of their search functionality. At the moment I suspect that researchers would not depend on GPS info for refining searches because they know that they will be excluding a lot of quality images. In future things might change though, and it may a wise move to start tagging images now. I blogged about the pain of retrospectively applying IPTC data - doing this for GPS data would be a nightmare, even if you could remember where all the photos were taken.

I've played around a bit already with this technology, and I'll be writing about my experiences in the future

Comments (0) | Print | del.icio.us | Digg It! | Linking Blogs | 349 Views

Assign that IPTC data now!

January 31, 2007 4:04 PM | Related Categories: workflow

I've just been through the process of retrospectively applying IPTC/XMP data (henceforth called metadata) to several thousand images. Ouch. I always knew I was going to have to do it, a) for my own cataloguing purposes, and b) if I was ever going to submit images to some kind of stock archive.

Why did I delay? Well I couldn't make up my mind just how to go about the process of selecting what data to use, what should go in keywords, what in title/description etc. and I didn't want to have to retrace my steps afterwards. Wrong decision. In future I'm going to get that data applied after every shoot / download / scan -  whatever.

Now, I have a good idea about how I want to approach this task, so it won't be such a problem, but really a lot of the things you are going to add to the metadata are pretty obvious as soon as you've taken the shot, so there's no reason for delaying. Also, once you have some metadata assigned it will make it easier to search and group images for further metadata refinements.

I'm going to outline my approach to assigning metadata in a future post - watch out for it.

Comments (0) | Print | del.icio.us | Digg It! | Linking Blogs | 313 Views
Implementation by Forthmedia Based on BlogCFC by Raymond Camden.