Photo Geo-Tagging on the Cheap
Frugal Traveler - A New York Times Blog February 18, 2009, 9:53 am Regular readers of the Frugal Traveler may recall my experiments with using GPS. Back in 2007, when I drove cross-country, I hung a Sony GPS-CS1KASP from my rearview mirror; it tracked my progress for 12,000 miles, recording every wrong turn and gas station stop with remarkable accuracy. (Zoom in deep to the cross-country Google map, and you'll see what I mean.) The ATP Photo Finder. Last summer, however, I had less luck when I attempted to geo-tag my photos - that is, automatically add latitude and longitude coordinates for future journalistic and archival use - as I traveled around Europe on the Frugal Grand Tour. The ATP Photo Finder, green block outfitted with a GPS receiver, which I carried hooked to my belt, rarely worked at all, and when it did, the coordinates it returned were miles off base. Unable to afford a camera with integrated GPS, like the Ricoh 500SE (over $1,200), unwilling to go down a step in quality with a geo-tagging cameraphone like the Nokia N78 (around $350) and unready to abandon my trusty Panasonic Lumix LX-3, I was about to give up on geo-tagging entirely. That would have been a sad concession: providing accurate location data is an important part of what I do (or try to do) as the Frugal Traveler - and there are a growing number of fellow travelers for whom geo-tagging is an attractive option. The Eye-Fi Explore SD card. Most recently, though, I invested $129 in an Eye-Fi Explore SD card. The card, which just won a Good Housekeeping Very Innovative Product award, is a wonder of miniaturization: a two-gigabyte memory card outfitted with a Wi-Fi chipset, which not only allows it to automatically upload photos to my home computer and to my Flickr account but also lets it perform a kind of quasi-GPS, by triangulating nearby Wi-Fi hot spots. (It's how the first-generation iPhones did GPS, too.) ... http://frugaltraveler.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/18/photo-geo-tagging-on-the-cheap/ *********************************** * POST TO [email protected] * *********************************** Medianews mailing list [email protected] http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
