A Picture's With a Thousand Worlds

Pictures are great, but unless your subject is something iconic like the Eiffel Tower or the White House, it's hard to tell where the picture was taken. Fortunately, this is changing...

A brilliant site, Panoramio.com, invites you to upload your photographs and place them on a Google Map. Then they upload the best photos to Google to include in a special Google Earth Layer. All that means that you can open Google Earth and see pictures taken by normal people of whatever you are seeing on the map. It's a great example of how important not only the picture is, but also the location where the picture was taken. If you want to see an example of my Panoramio Pix on a web page, see the bottom of this one...

That's great, but if you have many pictures at all, it becomes really time consuming to manual locate them all. This is where GPS comes in.

I bought a Magellan eXplorist 400 the other day. This handy little GPS device will (among other things) track your location to within a few meters (usually). It also keeps track of what time you were at any given point. So when I use a little program like GPS Photo Linker for the Mac (in Windows, it seems the program to use is WWMX Location Stamper), it looks at the time the pictures were taken and where I was at that moment, then embeds the coordinates into the photograph. Now, when I upload the pix to Panoramio, they are automatically placed exactly at the place at which they were taken. Smart!

All this put together means that while traveling, I can sync my pictures with GPS data and do a quick little upload to show the world what pictures I have taken and where. It's almost like being there.