Online photos get dimension by Claudia Sonea

John Higham recounts on his plans of taking a hike in the Alps and how he is using geotagging, an emerging practice that involves tagging with location information of vacation photos shared by travelers and amateur photographers. Therefore, zooming in on the map it is easy to find geotagged photos and gain a fresh perspective about the chosen destination. It is largely practiced by tech-savvy and professional photographers but is likely to expand. GPS are becoming ubiquitous especially due to the fact that nowadays almost all cellphones and digital cameras have incorporated such a device. The new geotagged practice offers endless opportunities: for naturalists to map their bird sightings or chart out seal populations, for archeologists to mark where they unearth artifacts, for travelers to give life to their slideshows and so on and so forth. Andy Williams, general manager with the photo-sharing site SmugMug Inc confesses that it brings to a whole different level any presentation. Sprint Nextel Corp. and a newly unveiled gadget from Pharos Science & Applications Inc. High-end cameras from Nikon Corp. and Ricoh Co. can directly connect to GPS devices and support geotagging. But the surpise is expected from the upcoming PhotoFinder from ATP Electronics Inc. will write GPS information directly on a camera's memory card. Moreover, SmugMug, Google Inc.'s Picasa and Panoramio and Yahoo Inc.'s Flickr, photo sharing services, let you manually add photos to a map. While Google moved further last summer and extended its geotagging to its YouTube video-sharing site. There is also a negative side of the practice because satellite-dependent GPS doesn't work properly indoors, also there is a matter of privacy and GPS devices can tag the location of the photographer, while the landmark being photographed could be miles away (to this problem British entrepreneur Richard Jelbert offers the solution by embedding a compass that can help calculate the landmark's actual location). The issue of carrying an extra device and compatibility with the devices back home is expected to be solved through manufacturers that will include in camera GPS device, according to John Hanke, director of product management for geolocation services at Google. Until then it is your choice if you relay on the images shared and if you are willing to share tagged pictures with other too.

related story: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080119/ap_on_hi_te/where_s_my_photo;_ylt=AvUsrLjMOXG5h.QgPx2.6Cys0NUE

by Claudia Sonea for PocketNews (http://pocketnews.tv)

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