Sunday, July 23, 2006

 

GPS Cameras

Browsing some photos by Thomas Hawk on the BBC website, I read:
As chief evangelist for Zoomr, Mr Hawk is helping develop the latest innovations in photo-sharing. "I think you’ll see GPS built in to almost every camera in the future," he said. GPS will allow people to automatically tag photos with their exact location on the planet.

I love the idea of that! Being able to take photos of whatever you wanted, like some natural landmark you've seen as you drive through the countryside, and then being able to look in Google Earth to see what it was you photographed sounds fantastic. I have spent literally hours scanning aerial photographs to try and work out where I have been. Take this photo in Spain - where the hell was I at the time? I've used the distances on roadsigns and the timestamp on the file to try and work out using Autoroute where I must have been. I even tried looking up the Jardi restaurant on Google to see if there was an address but all to no avail (although I'm reasonably sure its Tàrrega, I wouldn't put money on it).

Now if the JPEG from the camera had date, time and latitude/longitude then this would be so much easier. Not sure how well it would cope with photographs from airplane windows - although the satellites are that little bit nearer, picking up enough signals to guarantee an accurate position using a small receiver on a battery-powered camera inside the cabin is going to be tricky.


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