Zombie Dinosaurs

A few years ago, I went on a little photo trek and showed off the photos. I vividly remember getting grilled about the various locations by a friend of mine. “Where were these taken?” she asked me about a particular set of photos. “Hmm,” I replied, “I don’t remember. I took so many photos, I can’t keep track.” If only there was some automatic way to tag my photos with location information, so they’d be able to tell me where they were taken. Yet another thing I’d never have to remember ever again!

Well, my wish has come true–geotagging is here. Actually, it has been here for a while, but it’s finally starting to almost-sorta reach the mainstream.

Geotagging is the term for adding location information to your photo files so they automatically know exactly where they were taken. And it’s one of the coolest things ever to happen to digital photography.

So how can a photo know where it was taken? With GPS, of course! GPS, that system of navigation satellites that most of us now take for granted to navigate around in cars, is also a nifty way to geotag your photos. In a perfect world, a GPS reciever would be built into all digital cameras. But right now, that’s not the case. Instead, we need to somehow marry GPS and photography to make geotagging work.

I’ve recently been experimenting with what is surely the most elegant geotagging tool ever made. I’m talking about Red Hen’s Blue2CAN.

In my experience, a better geotagging solution does not exist. It’s a small gadget about the size of your thumb that plugs into a small port on the front of several Nikon Digital SLRs, including the D200, D2X, D2Xs and D2Hs. It communicates wirelessly to any Bluetooth GPS receiver (like the kind that comes with inexpensive navigation programs and sits on your dashboard).

Blue2CAN automatically tags your photos (both JPG and RAW) as you take them with GPS data (all the usual stuff: latitude, longitude, and altitude), and that info is automatically readable by mapping and organizing software. Take a few pictures with Blue2Can attached to your D200, and upload them to your Flickr page, for example. Flickr adds a “map” link to each picture–click it and you can see exactly where it was taken. Even cooler: you can view all your photos as pushpins on a map, so you can go on a virtual walking tour of that Grand Cayman vacation.

My first experience with Blue2CAN was on a little photo trek last weekend out past Granite Falls, Washington, in search of a few little waterfalls. I put the Dell GPS puck in my jacket pocket and just took photos normally. The GPS reciever kept a solid lock on the satellites–I never even had to think about it–and my camera, via Blue2CAN, kept sync with the reciever, as proven by the 150-or-so photos I inspected at home, each of which had embedded geotags.

Some of those photos were parts of a series of high dynamic range (HDR) photos, and I was disappointed to find that when I combined photos in Photomatix Pro, the GPS data was stripped out of the final composite image. But all the other shots did just fine, even after being edited in Lightroom and Photoshop. You can see a few examples of my geotagging expereince on my Flickr page, or just go direxctly to my map (which, at the moment, just just a few geotagged images, but that will no doubt change now that Blue2CAN is my new best friend).

Look for more about geotagging–including other ways to geotag your photos if you don’t own a Nikon D-SLR–in an upcoming Digital Focus newsletter. I’ll update this post when that issue goes live.