I have finally managed to combine my knowledge of electronics, photography and location based services in a new field of photography called geo-photography. This is where you store the exact location (longitude and latitude) and the compass direction of each photograph you take.

To do it, you need a GPS receiver which can record a track of your movements when out photographing. Software is available on the Internet that then takes the GPS track from the GPS, links it to the time stamped JPEG pictures on the digital camera and hey-presto you have an image that is geo-tagged.

Having geo-tagged photographs really helps organise your photos into a powerful searchable database of pictures based on location as well as time and perhaps key words. You will be able to select your pictures by clicking on a map and seeing where they were all taken.

That is only the start of the benefit. Where geo-tagging becomes really powerful is when images are published on the internet along with the geo-metadata. Search engines like Google or Yahoo will soon be able to search for an image not only based on keywords but also geo-tagged data like the location and direction. You will be able to share your pictures with people from around who are interested in the area you photographed.

New applications will appear like Photosynth from Microsoft. This exciting new program allows you to stitch your photographs together automatically producing a 3D walk-through montage of the area you photographed. Very cool, but imagine if your images could be combined with pictures taken by others - the montage becomes much more rich and detailed. Geo-tagged images will drive applications like Photosynth.

Google and Microsoft have mostly completed imaging of the world from the vertical - The next frontier is imaging the world from the horizontal - the way humans see the world.

To help me geo-tag my pictures I have built a device called “Geo-Tagger “- see my separate page on Geo-Tagger.

Richard Jelbert - GEO-PHOTOGRAPHY