Geotagging explained

Well this might not be possible in Africa but it is a technological advancement that I see being part of us in a few months time. I bet you this is already available in most high end digital cameras and phones and will soon be all over just like the color screen... Get it?

The name might sound decidedly high-tech, but geotagging is actually a simple, fun activity that's easy to get to grips with. It's also massively useful, and can provide an accurate location of every photo you take, tweet you send or restaurant you want to visit. Join us as we pinpoint the best that geotagging can offer.

What is geotagging?

Even if you don't use it, you may have heard of geotagging by now. But while the name may sound futuristic, the reality is far more everyday – in fact, there's every chance you're already using it and just don't know it.
Geotagging, as the name suggests, is the process of applying a geographical tag to an electronic file, such as a photograph or video clip. It requires the device recording the file – for example, a digital camera or mobile phone – to be able to geographically locate itself using some form of global positioning system (GPS).
In addition to basic latitude and longitude co-ordinates, geotags can also log information such as altitude and place name to more accurately place a file.

The big picture

So far, geotagging has been most widely used in digital photography, where the benefit of being able to accurately locate the subject of a photo on a map is obvious. At the very least it frees up hours of time manually labelling your images and at the best it can provide ready-made ways to classify your snaps that services such as Google Maps, Flickr and Picasa will understand.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg. To truly understand the potential this technology has to offer, you can't just look at a single gadget in isolation – you have to consider the bigger picture. For example, geotagging could be used to send distress signals with an accurate location should you become stranded off the beaten track, or to geographically place a blog post or news article.
There's even geocaching – an informal sport based around geotagging that sees items hidden away at a specific location. Much like a treasure hunt, you then have to follow a series of co-ordinates to track down the prize, with the first person to successfully arrive at the final location declared the winner.

Geotagging gear

Geotagging functionality has sprung up on all kinds of gadgets recently, but still the two most common places you'll see it are on mobile phones and cameras – the former because so many new handsets have GPS on board anyway, and the latter because the benefit is most obvious.
Even if your digital camera doesn't offer geotagging – and a large number don't – you can still save yourself the trouble of labelling all those holiday snaps by investing in a third-party photo tagger. So long as the time on your camera and the tagger is synchronised, you can simply pop your memory card into the tagger once you're finished taking snaps and this device will auto-fill the co-ordinates for each photo's time stamp.
We're also starting to see geotagging appearing on the feature list of more and more camcorders too, which adds the benefit of not only placing a clip, but potentially tracking your movements whilst you recorded it too.
And tablets PCs mostly come packing GPS, meaning that many of the apps and games available for them will utilise this geotagging potential, from location-based fun like Foursquare and Gowalla to placing your Tweets on a map.

Do more with geotagging

Yes, you can tag your photos, but that's just the beginning. Here are some other ways geotagging can come in handy:

Augmented reality

Part of the “bigger picture” geotagging helps make possible, augmented reality lets you see what your camera-equipped device is seeing on screen in real-time, but with an overlay of geolocated information such as nearby places of interest, Wi-Fi hotspots, museums and restaurants.

Holiday blogs

Sometimes on holiday it’s hard to remember all of the places you’ve visited, in what order you visited them or where you exactly were when you found that perfect beach with the wonderful view. Geotagging lets you order your holiday snaps in chronological order and reference where each of them was taken. As a result you may be surprised just how much you did in such a short space of time.

Following directions

When remembering directions, instead of trying to recall street names, simply take photos along the way and you'll be able to see directions based on prominent landmarks – much more fun than reading a map.

Tweets

Add extra relevance to your 160-character musings by including your geographic location. Maybe not the thing to do when sitting alone at home, but great for pointing out random discoveries or locating a friend in a crowd, for example.