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The Holy Grail of Geotagging
David Thulin is searching for a geotagging camera:
I have been looking far and wide for the tools needed for immediate and automatic geotagging of images taken. My quest took me through Yahoo! Answers, numerous searches through forums and gadget-sites — all without success.
The GE E1050 is what brought me to you — but, alas, we both seem to have come to the conclusion that although it comes close, it does not really do it.
Now — to put things clearly: is there, anywhere, a consumer/prosumer point and shoot camera which immediately embeds long/lat (and maybe even altitude) figures into the EXIF-data of images taken?
Now this is a good question. The only solutions I’m aware of are external devices that connect to cameras (such as Ricoh’s 500SE camera, which accepts such a module, the Jobo Photo GPS, or, for Nikon DSLRs, the GeoPic II or other options) or GPS loggers that embed the geodata when you get back to your computer. But an all-in-one option?
While this is not your traditional digital camera, it does geotag on the fly. It is the Surveylab’s ike GPS. It is a GPS unit with a built in camera and laser offset. Basically take a picture, and a GPS coordinate is automatically taken and associated with it. We have work with it on a couple projects so far and seems to work really well.
Check it out:
http://www.survey-lab.com/products.htm
The Nokia N95 telephone does this when you install Nokia’s Location Tagger. Very useful!
Using a cellphone with an integrated GPS is the main option available at the moment. Nokia phones with Location Tagger are one option. The Mio A702 cellphone is also supposed to do “geotagging”. For other phones, there are various software options.