Public Access

Geotagging images is important to me. I know where they were taken, but it's an issue of public access to the where and when.

We're not at the point of having all cameras equipped with built in GPS. It's just a matter of time before this happens. In the meantime, if you want to geotag an image, you either find a GPS unit that works with your specific camera, or you do it manually.

What I've noticed is that doing it manually is a lot of trouble (I know it's time consuming for me), so a lot of people will just indicate what city, or state, or maybe just the country they were in at the time a particular photo was taken, or the indicate nothing at all and leave you guessing.

For me, this just doesn't work. In fact, even though I manually tag all of my photos on a map after they've been uploaded to flickr, and carry around a GPS unit on trips to areas I'm not completely familiar with, I want a better and more accurate way of geotagging images.

The problem is that I've got several digital cameras, going the route of getting a GPS unit for each camera doesn't work. Not all the cameras will support this.

What to do? Well, I did some research and found a device called i-gotU which will support any camera, provided the images are shot in jpg format.

It's a little stand alone GPS device, very simple and in fact the only button it has is to turn it on, and it's about the size of a matchbox.

I tried it yesterday, and was very impressed with it. I made sure that my camera's clock was set the same as that of the i-gotU (which is how this thing works) and then went out and took some pictures.

After returning home, I downloaded the images I took, and plugged in the I-gotU GPS device and had it map my images. It was spot on. It even saved the info to the EXIF data.

I'm going to love this thing. I wish it worked with camera RAW files, but for the time being it doesn't and it's not too much trouble for me to work around this limitation.

Still, I can't wait for the day when this doesn't have to be done and cameras come equipped with built in GPS.