Tip - Nokia Labs' Location Tagger

With Nokia Location Tagger, you can automatically tag your location data to your pictures. As you take a picture, your GPS coordinates are saved to the EXIF header of the JPEG file. You can use this data later, for example, to locate your pictures on a map. Try it out!

Vegas the dog tracked with Nokia Sports Tracker and N95

A video captured at Nokia World 2007 (by yours truly) showing an innovative app and user of Nokia Beta Labs popular Sports tracker application. Vegas the do wears a Nokia N95 GPS enabled device on his collar and him and his owner track his following using sports tracker.. clever and funny! Well done Vegas... I think I'l lstrap my old N95 to Nash my lab!

Geolocated photos into Google Maps or Google earth via Geo-RSS with ease

This may be old-school for some of you, others will appreciate this simple tip. All you need here is a Nokia N95 or other GPS-enabled device, some geotagged photos, a flickr account, a geo-RSS feed, and a Google account (optional) - read on for this simple GeoRSS photo feed, google map tutorial. If you use a GPS-enabled cameraphone (like the Nokia N95, N82, Nokia Navigator etc...) then you can easily post your photos to flickr or other online services (use a tool like Shozu to help with this). But did you know that Flickr creates a Geo-RSS feed from your photo stream? Even better, you can simply copy and paste your Geo-RSS feed location into the google maps search bar and voila... your photos are now available via Google maps to share with others, save to your mymaps or whatever the heck you want to do. Simply look at the bottom of your flickr page, you'll see options like RSS, GeoFeed and KML - yes you can easily open your photos in Google Earth too with a flickr provided KML file!

For users of Google, if you save your custom map in your MyMaps you'll have the ability to easily share your map feeds and you can even embed them in a webpage or blog.

Go to your flickr page, scroll to the bottomcopy the GeoRss feed url
jump back to google maps
paste the RSS feed url into the search bar and click "search maps"
click the "Link to this page" you can grab a link or embed the map into your webpage.

The link to this page provides a link back to Google Maps where you can view the photos

Selecting the Paste html code into your webpage is simple and displayed below - this is a live Google Map pulling my geotagged photos from the GeoRSS feed via Flickr.

View Larger Map
useful links:
www.google.com/maps
www.flickr.com
www.shozu.com
www.georss.org
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoRSS
Yahoo! Maps Web Services - GeoRSS v2 Reference

Geotagging / Geolocating your flickr photos with Yahoo! zonetag and locr - a short tutorial

ok… more on the geotagging photos sent to flickr via shozu and my Nokia N95 GPS-enabled smartphone. I’ve recently been doing some research to figure out exactly how to geotag my photos, and get them up on flickr then view on a map. From the outside looking it one would think, “no problemmo”, however, things are not often as simple as they would seem. Luckily there’s a couple of good third party apps that work very well. Those of you that depend on out of the box functionality that wil accomplish this will have to try again!

My research has led me to believe the following:
- there’s much confusion out there about this.
- it’s a total pain in the arse to accomplish using the Nokia N95 out of the box
- it’s not as simple as blogs and other write ups lead you to believe
- many people seem to be having trouble with many different aspects of this.
- some people seem to be experiencing difficulties uploading via shozu from the Nokia N95 - I have yet to see any issues with this.
- apparently you can tag photos from N95 directly with GPS coords if you run sprt tracker or load the maps application - I’ve yet to be able to accomplish this seemingly simple task.

Enter Yahoo! Research labs zonetag and locr. Zonetag from Yahoo! has just recently come out with a version that supports Symbian S60 3rd edition devices (Nokia N80, N95, 6110 etc…). The application is very simple to use and it works. Simply install zonetag, setup your preferences (I’m still tweaking these) load the app, connect the GPS to grab your fix, take a photo, upload to flickr… it’s as simple as that! Once on flickr your photos will have a hyperlink to map the photo and the coordinates will display when you view the photo on a map. So far I’ve had excellent results with this application.

Locr (www.locr.com) operates in a similar manner. Install the app, setup an account, connect to GPS to get a fix, snap a photo, upload to flickr and to locr if you wish. Your photos are maintained in a locr account and from the mobile device you can also view your photos or photos that are near you. Once feature I’m not big on is that the application takes over the camera and you don’t seem to get the full functionality from your device. This contrasts with Zonetag where you use the camera in the same mode that you normally would with your device.

Please note, you should have an all you can eat data plan to use these applications otherwise the results (and your next phone bill) could be scary! I use shozu for uploads normall, however, it seems that when using zonetag or locr you are actually bypassing the shozu functionality… I’m not worried as I can use al teh data I want. Stay tuned for more on these apps. Overall, I give locr a 3.5 out of 5, zonetag gets 4.5 out of 5!

Related weblinks:

http://flickr.com/photos/gisuser/

http://zonetag.research.yahoo.com

http://www.locr.com/

Geotagging your flickr photos with Yahoo! zonetag and locr - a short tutorial

ok... more on the geotagging photos sent to flickr via shozu and my Nokia N95 GPS-enabled smartphone. I've recently been doing some research to figure out exactly how to geotag my photos, and get them up on flickr then view on a map. From the outside looking it one would think, "no problemmo", however, things are not often as simple as they would seem. Luckily there's a couple of good third party apps that work very well. Those of you that depend on out of the box functionality that wil accomplish this will have to try again!

My research has led me to believe the following:
- there's much confusion out there about this.
- it's a total pain in the arse to accomplish using the Nokia N95 out of the box
- it's not as simple as blogs and other write ups lead you to believe
- many people seem to be having trouble with many different aspects of this.
- some people seem to be experiencing difficulties uploading via shozu from the Nokia N95 - I have yet to see any issues with this.
- apparently you can tag photos from N95 directly with GPS coords if you run sprt tracker or load the maps application - I've yet to be able to accomplish this seemingly simple task.

Enter Yahoo! Research labs zonetag and locr. Zonetag from Yahoo! has just recently come out with a version that supports Symbian S60 3rd edition devices (Nokia N80, N95, 6110 etc...). The application is very simple to use and it works. Simply install zonetag, setup your preferences (I'm still tweaking these) load the app, connect the GPS to grab your fix, take a photo, upload to flickr... it's as simple as that! Once on flickr your photos will have a hyperlink to map the photo and the coordinates will display when you view the photo on a map. So far I've had excellent results with this application.

Locr (www.locr.com) operates in a similar manner. Install the app, setup an account, connect to GPS to get a fix, snap a photo, upload to flickr and to locr if you wish. Your photos are maintained in a locr account and from the mobile device you can also view your photos or photos that are near you. Once feature I'm not big on is that the application takes over the camera and you don't seem to get the full functionality from your device. This contrasts with Zonetag where you use the camera in the same mode that you normally would with your device.

Please note, you should have an all you can eat data plan to use these applications otherwise the results (and your next phone bill) could be scary! I use shozu for uploads normall, however, it seems that when using zonetag or locr you are actually bypassing the shozu functionality... I'm not worried as I can use al teh data I want. Stay tuned for more on these apps. Overall, I give locr a 3.5 out of 5, zonetag gets 4.5 out of 5!

Related weblinks:

• my locr and zonetag photos on flickr
• zonetag
• locr

Flickr account holders can easily sign up for a zonetag key and start using it

Photos uploaded to flickr using zonetag - the title is automatically loaded with your location - notice the "map" link

The photo appears exactly where I took it on the map!

Zonetag GPS connect function on N95 (left) and locr application as seen on the device (right)