'When you add a map to a presentation, you've added another dimension, especially if you say, `I took this great trip to China, and it was 5,000 miles over the course of a month' and they see a route,' said Andy Williams, general manager with the photo-sharing site SmugMug Inc. Travelers can wow family and friends and bring life to slideshows. Archaeologists can mark where they unearth artifacts. Now, naturalists can map their bird sightings or chart out seal populations. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a picture with geotagging can add a few hundred more. 'I think it's definitely headed for the mainstream.' 'It's something that will become integral to the way digital imaging works,' said Aimee Baldridge, a New York-based writer and photographer who tracks trends with digital imaging. Global positioning is becoming omnipresent as more cell phones and digital cameras have built-in GPS support. That's just one of the growing number of uses for geotagging, which is largely practiced by tech-savvy and professional photographers but is likely to expand. 'This affords me a way of seeing not just a map or satellite image but the landscape of where I want to go.' 'I do like to see a place before I go and study more about it,' said Higham, 47, of Mountain View, Calif.

By zooming in on the map, he could easily find geotagged photos along the Via Alpina and gain a fresh perspective. These images were just like all the other vacation photos shared by travelers and amateur photographers, except they'd been tagged with location information in an emerging practice known as 'geotagging.'Īrmed with such data, Higham didn't have to search endless combinations of keywords and guess how photographers would describe images in captions. NEW YORK - To plan an upcoming hike in the Alps, John Higham scoured scores of photos plotted along his route on a digital map for clues to the steepness of trails and the availability of accommodations or camp sites.

Expert gps geotagging photos