Recently CNet’s Crave gadget blog and other place like Dvice has discovered a new GPS geotagging hardware for Nikon DSLRs from an European company Foolography that we mentioned a while ago. Except the price changes there is nothing new. Basically the “Unleashed” is a tiny Bluetooth module that sits directly on the 10-pin connector of Nikon DSLR cameras. It receives the GPS information from an external Bluetooth GPS unit
then relays the information to the camera. The camera then records the information as metadata in the photos taken. The main benefits of such approach instead of the direct wired connection are, 1) it is very small, 2) the Bluetooth GPS can be used for other things and it can be upgraded independently.
The company is currently at PMA 2009 (Warning: link has autoplay video) in Las Vegas. The product is not yet available for purchase. While you are waiting, you may want to check out another similar device called Blue2CAN.
I just recently started geotagging using my Nokia E71 cell phone. The phone has built-in 3.2MP camera and GPS. Using a software called locr, the location and time information are recorded in each photo. I can upload the images to locr’s own photo sharing site, or to Yahoo!’s flickr, directly from the phone. It is very nice! If I geotag all my phones, I won’t need to scratch my head trying to figure out where the heck I took the photo later, especially when my memory starts to fade when I am older.
As you may already know, you don’t need a GPS to do geotagging. The cheapest way is to find the spot where you took the phone on Google Earth or other mapping sites and manually insert the GPS coordinates in the EXIF header. Flickr allows you to do this easily. However this is really tedious and time consuming. I start to think how I can add location information to the images taken using Nikon DSLR cameras without the hassle of manually editing hundreds of photos I typically take each time. Read More…
