Geotagging photos with any digital camera and your iPhone

The new iPhoto has some really cool features. One of my favorites is the ability to sort photos by location. This is particularly useful (and entertaining) when you travel to the same places over and over again. Sorting by location allows you to see how much places have changed (or stayed the same, depending upon where you go).

I have a nice point and shoot (a Sony Cybershot) and my partner has a Canon Digital Rebel XT. Neither of these cameras have a GPS unit built into them and we don't really want to purchase new cameras to get geotags automatically added to our photos. We looked into getting an external device, like the Sony GPS-CS1KASP GPS Unit , but we are Mac users and the process, while pretty seamless I hear for Windows users, takes a lot more tweaking on a Mac.

One thing we do have are iPhones-- not second generation ones with GPS chips built-in, but iPhones nonetheless. I decided to find out if I could use a geotagging app on my phone to help me add location information to photos using cell tower triangulation. I eventually did find a good solution in Saltpepper's GeoTag.

The process of data collection is pretty simple and flexible. You can either set your camera's clock to match your iPhone's and then take pictures while running GeoTag. The app can keep your iPhone from sleeping, which will allow constant data collection, but which will also reduce your phone's battery life. Knowing that this would be a problem, the developer included a file name-based data collection mode in which you enter in the file name (IMG, DSCN, etc.) and the number of the next shot you will take into the app's settings. Every time you take a picture, just press the "collect" button in the app and it will store the location information along with the name of the image file it will eventually sync to. This allows you to put your phone to sleep when you are not actively taking pictures and recording data. This is the option that I chose and I found it to work well. Cell phone tower triangulation isn't perfect, but I am also only looking for a general location (i.e. Seattle, Pittsburgh, New York, etc.). GeoTag is really meant for second generation iPhones and I imagine that you would get much more precise results with the use of a GPS chip.

Syncing your location data with your photos isn't seamless, but it isn't bad. Using a free app that you download from the Saltpepper website, you can transfer the location data to the computer via your wireless network, then after transferring your pictures from your camera to a folder on your computer, open the images and associate the data. The desktop app is a little slow, so you must be patient and wait for your pictures to load. Once you feel confident that the location data is correctly associated with your photos, you can write the tags with the click of a button. The app will backup each file that it alters in case a problem occurs, although I have yet to experience one. You can then import your photos into iPhoto or upload them to a geotag-aware web service.

Overall the process was simple and well worth the $3.99 that the app cost. If the developers find a way to speed up the desktop app, they could be on to a killer app. Check out GeoTag at http://www.saltpepper.net/geotag/

Alternatively, you can do this for free by taking a picture with your iPhone in each location, importing it along with your digital camera's photos, and copying the location data to all of the photos in the import. Either way, you get to enjoy geotags in your photo albums.