Here’s an interesting advance in the field of geotagging photos. Merkitys is free, open-source software
that gives your cell phone the capability of uploading photos to Flickr and automatically tagging them with
location-specific metadata.
If your phone supports GPS, it’ll include the phone’s GPS coordinates at the
time the photo was taken. Even if your phone doesn’t support GPS, Merkitys
can include information about the local cell-phone network, which isn’t as
precise as GPS but still can identify location.
If your phone supports Bluetooth, Merkitys can tag your photos with the local
Bluetooth environment — IDs of nearby Bluetooth devices. (I’m not quite sure
how useful that bit is, but maybe I’m missing something.)
What does this amount to? Here’s a photo taken
by my friend, Jacob Kaplan-Moss, who installed Merkitys on his phone. The tags
(on the right side of the page) were added automatically by the software. The
ones that start with “cell:” are cell-phone-network metadata, such as the ID
of the cell tower Jacob’s phone was connected to when the phone took the
photo. The “bt=” tags are information about local Bluetooth devices. In the
software, Jacob associated the cell-phone tower with his physical location
(Lawrence, Kansas), so each photo he takes while his phone is connected to
that tower’s network will have “Lawrence, Kansas” appended as a tag.
Here’s an example of
a photo with longitude and latitude tags appended (“geo:long” and “geo:lat”).
All of this technology already has been possible, but Merkitys’ innovation is
to make it automatic. Clearly the implications of this are tremendous, both
for professional photojournalism and for amateur photography.
