Products Using GPS To Tag Digital Photos

GPS is becoming more and more popular in high(ish)-end phones so that SatNav can be used on the move and for a good laugh on Google Earth. But a growing use of GPS is seriously cool (and useful!) – digital cameras with GPS capabilities which allow you to tag your photos onto a map, so you can see exactly where you took them. Let’s look at the current contenders.

The ultimate product in this field at the moment simply has to be the Ricoh 500SE. This is the only digital camera at the moment (that we know of) with GPS capabilites built in, although we do expect more to start appearing very soon. It features an 8MP camera, has 3x optical zoom and even WiFi/Bluetooth connectivity, but carries a heavy price tag.

Moving on, there’s a decent number of products that allow you to geotag your photos with your current digital camera. Perhaps the best of these is the Eye-Fi Explore SD Card which is a 2 Gb SD card that gives you wireless access, and can calculate your position by triangulating the nearest Wi-Fi points – smart! Next up is the Sony GPS-CS1 which is cheaper than the Ricoh camera, but you do have to carry it around as a separate gadget. When you have all your photos, you just plug both the camera and GPS unit into your computer and snychronise the data – a very simple and efficient way of getting photos with GPS data on them!

Very similar to the Sony device above is the GPS Photo Finder (5th paragraph down) which correlates the data from the separate GPS unit to your digital camera, thus showing you where your pictures came from. Finally, this dull looking innovation is a more expensive version of the other geotagging units, but seems to be faster, and perhaps more accurate. The “Jobo Photo GPS Geo Tagging Flash Shoe” (try saying that after a few beers) which takes a fifth of a second to take the photo, can store a huge 1000 locations and is accurate down to 10m. Even Macs are supported.