Digital Home Thoughts: GPS Photo Linking

"Do you ever look back through your vacation photos and wonder where all of the photos were taken? What if there was a way to have all those images automatically show up as pins on a map or an aerial photograph? It may seem too good to be true, but it can be done. No mirrors or smoke; it's just making use of existing GPS technology. As you are out recording pictures, your GPS receiver is busy making a digital popcorn trail of your movements. Then when you're back on the computer, a topo map or aerial photograph is pulled from a terraserver on the Internet, and your shots show up on the map as clickable links to your photographs."



When I got my Powershot S300 for the first time, I was very excited about the PhotoStitch software that came with the unit and the Panorama assist mode that was built into the camera. Since I could not afford a panoramic camera, this was a perfect replacement. Well, when I read this article, it reminded me of that time right away.

This article explains in good detail the workflow required in linking your photographs by using GPS technology. Of course, and this is pointed out in the article as well, GPS does not work indoors so the data can be noisy. I still think this would be cool to do, much like your very own gigapixel image (refer to this site if your don't know about the gigapixel image) but it would be more in the form of a position based photo gallery.