I am so thrilled with devices which stamp my images with GPS data that I could jump for joy! It's not just because I love seeing images across a map. Its also because its yet more useful data about a photograph that I can use for years to come. And I don't have to manually enter it. Some devices even store address information. So I send up with being able to view images across a map (Figure 1) and can search by street, city, state/province, and country (see Figure 2's Keywords and Description, data which was automatically added).

When I return from a trip, just shooting images and adding them to DBGallery automatically provides lots of useful data. Last week I travelled to Fredericton, New Brunswick. It was my first time there. I can now simply type 'Fredericton' into city or keywords and up comes the images. Choose map view, and wa la! A map zoomed to Fredericton shows thumbs of the images exactly where they were taken. :)

Which devices stamp this info? Most mobile phones will. My Blackberry Curve does if that option is turned on. iPhones do. Some cameras have this functionality built right in. The Nikon Coolpix P6000, for example. Since many camera's still haven't this functionality built in I looked for another way. A great device I discovered is the JOBO photoGPS. It's a GPS receiver which attaches to any external flash slot of a camera. It stores GPS latitude, longitude and altitude at the time a photo is taken. You then use software which was supplied with the device to near instantly stamp all the photo jpg's with the GPS data as well as address information (I assume it picks address info up while the photos are being stamped with GPS data rather than at the time of shooting).

With the Exif data each camera stores in our images (such as camera, timestamp, if a flash was used, shutter speed) as well as this GPS data, it all adds up to rich and useful data without any effort. This is a very good thing.

Figure 1: Images displayed across a map. (Click for a larger view)

Figure 2: Address data automatically stamped by the JOBO photoGPS attachment. (Click for a larger view)