Geotagging
Interesting article about geotagging photos at NYT today. It’s a fairly superficial look at the various types of geotagging available now, with a look at a few sites including Flickr’s neat mapping features, but fails to mention the old-school “geo:lat=” and “geo:long=” tags that people have been using on Flickr for a long time now.
One thing that the article hits dead on, though, is the fact that location data for photos is going to be way more important to digital photographers than most of them realize. We’re all going to be awash in digital memories soon, and that extra contextual information will be really helpful. We already have the what, in the form of tags, and we have the when; geotagging is supplying the last piece of crucial information, the where.
The what will probaby be the next place we see real improvement here, in the form of software that can analyze your pictures and help you search by what (or who) is in them, without the need for you to have tagged them already.
For information on the dangers of geotagging photos, read this thread on mefi about a hacker who gave an anonymous interview to the Washington Post and then was outed on Slashdot via the photo’s EXIF data.
