If a picture is worth a thousand words, as the adage goes, than what is a geotagged photo worth? Priceless. What is a "geotagged photo" you might ask....well, in borrowing shamelessly from wikipedia:
Geotagging is the process of adding geographical identification metadata to various media such as photographs, video, websites, or RSS feeds and is a form of geospatial metadata. These data usually consist of latitude and longitude coordinates, though they can also include altitude, bearing, distance, accuracy data, and place names.
Some cell phones like the iPhone and Samsung Memoir already utilize a GPS chip along with built-in cameras to allow users to automatically geotag photos. A few cameras such as the Ricoh 500SE and the Sony DSC-HX5V have built-on or built-in GPS that allow for automatic geotagging. Nikon and Canon have also come out with custom geotagging solutions. Almost any digital camera can be coupled with a GPS and post processed with photo mapping software such as GPS-Photo Link, MediaMapper, Topofusion or EveryTrail GPS Connector (for Garmin gps products) to geotag photos by matching gps coordinates with photos. Twitter, the popular social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets, allows its users to geotag their locations via their tweets and pictures.......
So that's geotagging in a nutshell. Now why do I consider it priceless? From the perspective of an anthropologist who strives to integrate cultural data into geographic information systems (GIS), geotagging photos is an incredible way to add texture and nuance to traditionally two-dimensional maps. Photos taken at one's field site are a form of ground truth data, or data that are collected on location (as opposed to data collected remotely, such as aerial photographs and satellite images). Ground truthed data are important as they improve the accuracy of one's analysis (regardless of whether one is a forester, anthropologist, human geographer, or urban planner).
I have become interested in geotagging photos in the context of my dissertation research on landscape change within the Brazilian Landless Workers' Movement (MST). More specifically, I think geotagging photos will have great applicability in my research for helping to tell local people's stories.
I've recently been experimenting with the Ricoh Caplio 500SE camera system (camera + integrated GPS device). To date, I've been moderately impressed with this system. Yes, it does it's job, i.e. georeferencing photos....but it is fairly complicated to figure out how to use it. What has been even more frustrating has been integrating these data into a geographic information system, which from my perspective is the entire point of these cameras. As indicated in the Wiki description, there are various programs (both online and ones that can be downloaded to your computer) that allow one to do approximate geotagging via landmarks (i.e. take a picture of your house, go into Google maps, and link that photo with your house, or get the lat/long from Google Earth and do it more accurately). However, if you want to put your photos into a geographic information system (GIS) for whatever purpose (research, urban planning, ultimate techie street-cred) than it seemed that you would need to cough up more than $300 for the GPS Photolink Pro software package. This seemed ridiculous to me, and so I did a bunch of searching online, and found a solution, which I thought I'd share with y'all: ArcPhoto
In brief, ArcPhoto is a free toolset (a script) that can be used in ArcGIS. Here is what ESRI has to say about it: The ArcPhoto Tools are a set of geoprocessing tools and ArcMap user interface enhancements to enable the quick import of digital photography into the ArcGIS framework. The tools work directly off the EXIF (Exchangeable image file format) header information that is encoded into digital imagery. This information usually includes information about the type of camera used, focal length, aperture, type of flash, etc. For professional grade cameras or images taken with ArcPad 7/8, the imagery can potentially hold GPS location information about where the photo was taken as well. At 9.2 the ArcGIS framework can directly read this type of metadata and with the help of the location information the ArcPhoto tools allow for a quick and streamlined integration of rich visual information.
Special functionality for ArcMap includes the display of thumbnail images as “map tips” and the ability to create ArcPhoto Elements – think of thumbnail images as annotation for point features. Finally within the 3D environment the images are applied to create billboards and they are displayed using the captured orientation of the digital photography.
If you download it, make sure you read through the Read Me file (which should be located here on your computer once you download it C:/Program Files/ESRI/ArcPhoto Tools/Documentation/ArcPhoto.htm).
After some brief experimenting, I found that this program provides the functionality I'm looking for, namely, taking photos (either georeferenced or not-i.e. with knowledge of lat/long points you can geotag them yourself) and integrating them in a GIS, and the ability to create shapefiles from them.
As my research progresses I'll be sure to provide updates on these technologies.
