Photos, Exif, GPS and You

Because I can, I did

Honestly, I have no idea why I did this. What's even worse, I am pretty sure this is not going to do much for anyone here.

We'd like to get a sample of your brain tissue

So.... most of you out there own a digital camera. And as you may or may not know, every time you take a photo with it, your camera records all sorts of data about the shot, your camera, the time, and a myriad of other crap - this information is embedded right into each photo in something called the "Exchangeable image file format" or "Exif" for short.

You can read about the nitty gritty of it all over at Wikipedia if it makes you feel better.

Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together - mass hysteria

Now, where it gets sort of interesting, is somewhere in this specification they laid out a structure for storing geographic data, ya know, things like latitudes and longitudes. Riiiiight, exactly, you're a smart one. This gives us a means to tag photos with the location where they were taken. Or, ultimately, to use this data to place these photos on a map.

There are even a camera or two out there that have GPSs built it them. Not to mention an ever increasing number of softwares that will geotag* your photos like Robogeo, Picasa, and Topofusion.

* "Geotag" would be what we call the process of adding this geographic information to the photo.

Symmetrical book stacking. Just like the Philadelphia mass turbulence of 1947

That's all well and good, but what does this really do in the big picture? Well, apart from giving us the ability to neatly store where a photo was taken, well.... sadly, it does not do much at all really.

Well, ok, it does a little here and there. We are actually seeing a few applications and websites out there putting this data to use. For example:

• You can open a geotagged photo up in Google Earth.
• Flickr (if enabled) will read this data and put it to good use.
• Panoramio reads this data.
• Picasa not only allows you to tag, but reads and maps geotagged Exif information.
• Plus a handful of other sites like Zooomr, Fotki, and loc.alize.us are jumping on the wagon.

I kind of am hoping search engines will start indexing this data.

Aim for the flattop!

So, as mundane and probably fruitless as this topic is, you may have noticed that we (well, me and maybe a few others) here at Crankfire apparently like all things geographic. So it was matter of principle that we did something with it. Right? You betcha. Here's what we did:

• Photos associated with waypoints: Since we are sort of organized here, with photos associated with waypoints, it was a safe bet to embed these photos with a geotag and description from their parent waypoint record.
• Uploading Geotagged Photos: Maybe you are already into this, maybe you have one of them fancy cameras that does this automatically. Well, when you upload a getagged image, we will try to detect it and see if you want to enter it as a waypoint into the Crankfire system.
• Photo Exif GeoTagger: We have the technology, why not break it out into some sort of standalone tool that someone out there might benefit from? Well here you go. It's simple and hokey for sure, but it gets the job done.

Where do the stairs go?

I am going out on a limb here, but I predict this feature will be the least used most transparent bit of feature you will ever experience on this site. I bet you won't even read this far. Hell, I wanted to stop typing this hours ago, I can't imagine the pain you would have to endure to actually be reading these words.

But let me share with you why this mod is kind of important: it is the first feature running under Crankfire's new internal processing framework. Basically, I am starting to straighten things out in the backend, and this is what has officially kicked it off!

With that being said, if you experience any issues or whatever with uploading photos, please please please let me know. I never really test my shit all that much.

I think I gotta lay off the smack.