a couple neat photo tagging and geocoding apps

One neat thing about having a blog is sometimes info comes to you, rather than you having to seek it out.

Via a comment on universal photo tagging - almost, I find

ITag - Photo Tagging Software

ITag is a free tool that is designed to make editing of key IPTC fields of your digital photos very easy.  The editable IPTC fields are Headline, Caption and Keywords (which effectively translates into title, description and tags).  The IPTC data can be read by other software such as IrfanView and Flickr.

Geocoding your photos is also straight forward by drag and dropping Google Earth placemarks (*.kml).  When geocoding, the data can optionally be saved as IPTC tags (Flickr style), to the EXIF fields or both.

Geocoded photos can be opened in Google Earth to see the location they were encoded with.  Photos geocoded with WWMX Location Stamper are also recognised and can be viewed in Google Earth.  Groups of photos can be selected and the photo's viewed in a single kml - like this.

There is also an option to convert GPX tracklogs to KML (Google Earth) format.

WWMX Location Stamper

checks a digital photo's embedded timestamp, correlates it to GPS track files loaded in GPX format ..., then stamps the image with latitude and longitude location information.  Don't have a GPS device?  This application can also be used to drag and drop your images onto a map in order to stamp them.

That's pretty neat.  Both apps require Windows with .NET installed.

For the Mac, a Google search turned up GPS Photo Linker.

The functionality of these apps actually raises an issue, which is

Dear Google,

Instead of (or in addition to) stuff like buying Writely, it would be nice if you would enhance your existing applications.  For example, Picasa - Google Earth integration would be a natural (UPDATE 2006-06-18: Google added this feature.  Thanks!).  Enhanced use of IPTC in Picasa and Google Image Search would also make sense.  Also, what happened to the Picasa blog?  http://picasa2.blogspot.com/ now gives 404 not found.

But also

Dear Digital Camera Makers,

Please have your cameras automatically geocode, e.g. by talking to a GPS over Bluetooth.  Or have it talk to my cellphone, which may have a variety of ways to determine where I'm located.

UPDATE 2006-04-02: Also check out my new page on how to geocode photos.