3 Tips for understanding and using Geotagging

Geotagging is the process of attaching geographic coordinates to media based on the location of a mobile device. There are Geotagging Tool which are recently announced -

Geo Tag Generator - Best tool for Geotagging of images.

What is Geotagging?

Geotagging is when you add metadata to your photos or videos to identify them geographically. If you have ever uploaded smartphone or drone images to Adobe Lightroom, you may have noticed this nifty feature.

When you go to the Map tab (the third tab), you'll see markers that very accurately represent where your photos were taken. When you click on an individual marker, the shot taken at that position is displayed.

Here are 3 tips for understanding and using geotagging

1. How does geotagging work?

Quite simply, the camera, drone or phone captures the GPS and in some cases the GLONASS satellite positioning system and triangulates the location of the device.

This data is then stored in the metadata of the image as GPS coordinates. Often the altitude above sea level is also recorded, which is especially useful for drone images. GPS is part of the standard EXIF data included in image file formats such as JPEG and RAW.

2. How to geotag your images?

As mentioned earlier, many cameras do not have a built-in GPS feature. However, there are a number of workarounds you can use to add GPD data to your photos. Primarily, this involves using a smartphone and an app. Even inexpensive smartphones often have a GPS locator built in, and if we use this in combination with a dedicated app, we can accurately record the location where we take each shot.

For this to work, the smartphone must somehow be synchronized with the camera. Most often, this is done by synchronizing the time. Before you start recording, synchronize the time on your camera with the exact time on your smartphone.

Since phones often use internet time, they are very accurate. Now when you activate the app, it will start recording your exact route through the shot. When you get home and upload the footage, you need to sync the images with the data recorded by the app. This is usually done with a desktop app that is provided with the smartphone app and embeds the GPS coordinates into the EXIF data of each image.

3. Why you should geotag?

There are a few reasons why you should geotag your images, primarily as a "memory aid".

Many of us upload our images to Lightroom or the like, and then when we look at them a few months later, we can not remember where they were taken. We may remember the city or even the street, but not the exact location where they were taken. With geotagging, we can zoom in to the exact spot where we took the photo and identify the subject.

Geotagging is also very useful for those who want to plan a shot in advance. You can visit the location in any weather and capture the best angles with your smartphone. When you return, you can use the geotagged location to guide you to the best shooting points.

For photographers looking to submit images to stock agencies, geotagging can be invaluable. Not only to add the immediate location to the metadata, but also to research the surrounding details for keywords.

Geotagging methods

Assigning place names to objects was the earliest method of georeferencing a resource. Most online image portals used this method of manually adding the place name in the early days of geotagging images and later developed better methods of geotagging. Currently, an image can be geotagged in three ways:

(1) Automatic digital cameras with GPS:

Some digital cameras and camera phones have a built-in or linked GPS device. The images taken by these digital cameras contain an EXIF (Exchangeable Image File) header with latitude, longitude, altitude and many other parameters related to the taking of that photo. This is the simplest and most accurate method of geocoding an image if a good satellite signal is available at the time of capture.

(2) Manual geocoding:

Location information is added to photos manually by specifying coordinates or selecting a location on a map when uploading images to the Internet. The precision and accuracy of geocoding in this method depends on the user and the mapping tools of the websites.

(3) Digital camera synchronized with a separate GPS:

Most digital cameras sold today do not have a built-in GPS receiver; however, for geocoding, an external location-based device such as a handheld GPS logger is used with these digital cameras. Using the software, the timestamps created by the camera are synchronized with the timestamps recorded in the GPS logger, and based on the timestamps, the corresponding coordinates stored in the GPS logger are added to the EXIF information of the photograph. The most important factor in this process is that the clocks in these devices must have the same time for proper synchronization to occur.

Geotag Accuracy

From the survey results, 71% of the images are geotagged with the correct location, 16% of the images are geotagged close to the actual location, 5% of the images are geotagged with the wrong location, and for 8% of the images, participants did not provide a clear answer. We reviewed these images and their geotags and found that the situation on the ground differs from the survey results, primarily due to ambiguity in judging some images as the correct location or close to the correct location. When we combine and compare these images (correct location + nearby), the survey results say that 87% of the images are in the correct location or near the correct location, while in reality it is 89%..