This recent Christmas brought me a wonderful new Garmin 60CSx GPS. Despite the challenge of explaining why I "needed" a GPS, my mother decided to get me one anyway. When asked what I was going to use it for, one of my responses has always been that I was going to record the position of my photographs while out shooting. This was a great plan, but I hadn't actually been able to try this until this weekend.

Here's a quick primer on GPS/photo integration, called geotagging. Digital photographs contain additional information in the file besides the data that describes the pixels of the photo itself. This extra data is generically referred to as metadata. This metadata can take several forms, but some common information stored are: the date and time a photo was taken, the shutter speed, aperature and focal length used, the flash status, camera model, etc. Most of this information is recorded by the camera at the moment the photo is taken, but additional data can be added by using software after the photos have been downloaded. Location data such as longitude and latitude coordinates is one type of data that can be stored within the photographic files themselves. This is what I have attempted to do.

Julie and I took a 7.8 mile hike through Rock Creek Park on Sunday and I recorded the entire hike as a tracklog on my GPS. A tracklog is a long list of coordinates taken every few seconds and saved on the device. After coming home I downloaded my photos from my camera and my tracklog from my GPS. I was then able to use a program called RoboGeo to merge the data. To determine the correct coordinates for a particular photo, the program compares the timestamp of the photo and finds the nearest coordinate timestamp in the tracklog. It then automatically writes the position data into the metadata of the photo.

This merging of photos and coordinates is great, but to really appreciate the benefits of this, yet another service must be used. In this case, Flickr. I use Flickr to host and share my photographs with the world. In August, 2006 Flickr began adding support for viewing photos based upon where they were shot, via a map interface. I've uploaded 11 photos from my hike that can be viewed on a satellite/road hybrid map of Rock Creek Park.

Technology and usable interfaces to technology have come a long way in the past few years. To enable all of this integration --this synergy-- satellites provide both the images of my neighborhood and the location data to the GPS. Digital photos allow the capture and storage of immense amounts of our lives. Internet services like Flickr allow us to share these photos with the world and can now be accessed basically anywhere via a mobile phone.

The near future will showcase an accelerated integration of disparate technologies. New, as-of-yet undreampt ways of relating data to people together will arise. Practices such as geotagging will become even more streamlined. Instead of merging location data from a GPS with photos from a digital camera with third party software back at the computer, it will all happen automatically. The GPS will be integrated into the camera. After the photos are taken, geotagged and person-tagged with face-recognition, they'll be uploaded immediately to some future Flickr right on the spot via a wireless link to the cell phone. This sort of streamlined integration is literally months away, not years. The future looks like a lot of fun.