Ever since I discovered that Google Photos will display my photos as points on a Google Map, I’ve been fascinated by the possibilities. I love the idea that I can view my photos from college as a map of the college’s campus. I could browse by dorm instead of by date. I could browse through photos from an old road trip by looking at the route. In fact, since the photos are tagged with a date and time and a location, Google should be able to tell me what the route was automatically. How cool is that? What a great way to look at photos from a vacation or compare different hiking routes for a day trip.
The only problem is that it’s really tricky to go through and manually tag photos with exact gps coordinates. But I’m convinced that this is a technical challenge someone should be able to solve. And, finally, a couple of solutions are appearing on the market.
The first approach just sticks a gps reciever onto a standard digital camera. This feature started popping up on digital cameras from second tier manufacturers last winter. But despite the recent price drops, a gps receiver still isn’t cheap. In an attempt to keep the price down, these manufactures stick low quality gps recievers on some very mediocre cameras. The result is an expensive, gimmicky camera with only one application. Not a big selling point for me.
I just learned about a second approach today. That’s what inspired this entry. The BBC show Click aired a review of the latest generation of “eye-fi” memory cards for digital cameras. These are standard memory cards with a built in wi-fi transmitter. It’s the same feature that Kodak built into it’s now discountinued Easy Share One.
With a wi-fi transmitter, you can upload photos to your computer or directly to a photosite like flickr with no wires. The transmitter automatically detects when you’re near your computer or some other open wi-fi connection and starts sending. The camera stays in your bag, but the photos end up on your computer. It’s a neat feature, but not one that justifies the extra price tag that it carries.
However, the new “eye-fi” cards also record information about the wireless networks around them each time a photo is taken. When you upload your photos, it compares the networks around each photo to an online database and comes up with an approximate geographic location. It’s not a GPS coordinate, but it’s a cheaper way to get something pretty close. Genius!
Wi-fi transmitters are dramatically cheaper than gps recievers. And because it’s built into the memory card, not the camera, you can tack it on to your existing camera for $20 or $30 and you can bring it to your next camera when you upgrade.
I’m waiting to hear from folks about how well this actually works. Obviously, this isn’t going to work for a serious hiker taking pictures in the middle of Yellowstone (not much wi-fi out there), but if it helps me relive the best moments from my next pubcrawl then I’m all for it.
A final note: our cell phones already have all this information, but my camera phone sure doesn’t keep track of it. Why don’t phone makers make it happen?
Apologies for the lack of research on this, but I’m on a web diet at the moment. Might post an update next week.
Forever 22 