WordPress.com has introduced geotagging of user profiles and posts. Location is input manually via an integrated Google map or automatically via GPS, the W3C Geolocation API, the Google Gears Geolocation API, or guesstimated from your IP address. The geodata are recorded in posts via the geo microformat plus geo.position and ICBM meta tags, and in feeds via GeoRSS and W3C geodata standards. More here; where's the geotag icon?
Tag archive for 'metadata'
PhotoLinker 2.0 ($US50, 30 day trial) is described by its developer as a 'pro geotagging and annotation tool'. Geotaggers who were familiar with GPSPhotoLinker will recognize the family resemblance, but will also appreciate the magnitude of changes this new app brings. It's no longer dependent upon use of a GPS track logger for a start, as integrated mapping now supports a manual geotagging mode (hence the dropping of 'GPS' from the name). There are improvements to workflow, a map viewer, a facility for track and waypoint management, and the pièce de résistance—EXIF metadata annotation. And yet it retains the incredible flexibility and the same precise control over automatic geotagging parameters that I appreciated in my review of GPSPhotoLonker. This post takes you on a visual walkthrough of the many new and refined features.
Continue reading 'PhotoLinker evolves geotagging on Mac'
I previously reviewed CDFinder, an asset manager that specialises in metadata, and looked at its potential role in the Mac geotagging workflow. The freshly-squeezed version 5.5 brings a few bug fixes, general enhancements, and of particular personal interest improved support for GPS-related functions. This post considers finding geotagged images, integration with other mapping services, integration with other geo-aware applications (via contextual menu modules), copying GPS locations, displaying KMZ files on your Google Map mash-up, and finding nearby images via your website.
Continue reading 'CDFinder update will please geotaggers'
The developer of CDFinder has released GPS-Info CMM, a free contextual menu plug-in for the OS X Finder. Images with coordinates in EXIF can be plotted directly using several online mapping services or in Google Earth. Meanwhile the iCab browser b49 delivers extended geotagging support, such as recognition of EXIF-GPS data within images displayed inline on a web page: auto-detection activates the geotag icon.
I've had a hard time "getting" RDF (e.g. how it differs from XML), but this article helps give it context. The semantic web is being built simultaneously from the bottom up and top down. Typifying the bottom-up approach, RDF content is machine-readable at the outset; powerful but complex (with several advantages over microformats), RDF is all about inter-operability. Top-down approaches introduce "metadata sprinkling" to existing content, simple but limiting by comparison e.g. microformats (using CSS class attributes as in hCard), or meta elements (meta tags such as those for geo-discovery). Both approaches are valid, but RDF is hard whereas microformats help "the rest of us" contribute to the semantic web. There may be a collision ahead, however, between microformats and RDFa (sprinklings of RDF embedded in existing XHTML).
Like many Mac users I archive my pictures in iPhoto, largely because I enjoy the tight integration this affords with Apple and third-party apps that might want to use them. Having entered the world of geotagging I was disappointed to discover that iPhoto can fail to show coordinates in EXIF (and when shown, oddly lists them under Exposure), does not recognise location data in IPTC headers, and does not provide any "show on map" facility (even Preview does this). Norbert Doerner of West-Forest-Systems then pointed out that I'd completely neglected archive and retrieval of geotagged images in my "ABC" article. This Mac software critique goes some way to redress that omission by considering the role of CDFinder in a Mac user's geotagging workflow. CDFinder is essentially an asset manager that catalogues any file on any volume (CD-ROM, DVD, USB drive, etc). But media metadata are its speciality, and this indexing powerhouse has recently been extended to handle geotags and provide related functionality.
Continue reading 'CDFinder in the Mac geotagging workflow'








