take photos with your digital camera
and tag with GPS location data
collected by your iPhone

Ever wondered how to find photos you took few years ago at the Disney World? Have you wanted to look at photos based on places you have visited, but didn't want to dig through your entire photo collection to find them? Organizing your photos by location, otherwise known as "geotagging," allows you to be able to find any photo based on the location where it was taken.

However, most digital cameras are not GPS-enabled, so location information must be added after the fact. In order to use the "Places" feature in iPhoto 09, you'd have to input location for each photo manually.

Demo Movie of "Places" (Apple iPhoto '09)

The GeoTag app for iPhone and iPod Touch allows you to capture GPS location information for digital photos that are taken with your non-GPS digital camera. Using the free software GeoTag Deskop, you can later add the captured locations to your photos so that you can upload them, already tagged, to iPhoto 09 and Flickr.

Collecting Location information with your iPhone

There are two ways to collect location information with your iPhone: Automatic Collection and Collection by Photo Name (Manual Collection).

Automatic Collection:
First, make sure that the date and time settings (including time zone) of your iPhone and your digital camera correspond. Then, turn on the GeoTag application when you take photos. That’s all – GeoTag will take care of the rest of work.

Collection by Photo Name:
If you don't want to leave your iPhone on the entire time you are taking photographs, simply turn on the iPhone and select the collect button on GeoTag when you take a photo. GeoTag will capture the specific GPS location for the photo by its name. However, to do this, you need to provide your digital camera’s photo name scheme in the settings menu. For example, if the name of the last photo you took is “IMG_0012.JPG”, then probably the next photo name will be “IMG_0013.JPG.” Then, you should put this name in the settings menu so that GeoTag could know which photo will be tagged next. The photo name pattern can be easily found from your digital camera’s LCD screen or when you copy photos to your desktop.

Managing collected locations on your iPhone

You can delete your collected locations or update location information from the “Manage” tab of your iPhone.

Note: This will only work for locations collected by photo name.

Sharing collected locations on to your Mac

GeoTag comes with a simple server that helps you share your collected locations with your Macintosh. You can turn on the server in the “Share” tab of your iPhone.

From the “Share” tab, you can also purge your collected geo locations after sharing them with your mac. It's important to purge collected location information regularly to save storage space on your iPhone.

Note: For sharing, your iPhone should be connected to the internet using wifi connection.

Downloading collected locations from your iPhone

Download your collected locations to your Macintosh through the free software GeoTag Desktop. To connect your iPhone from GeoTag Desktop, simply click the “Download GeoTags” button on the GeoTag Desktop application, and enter the IP address of your iPhone in the popup window. You can find the IP address from your iPhone under the “Share” tab.

To download location data from your iPhone, both of your iPhone and you mac should be connected to internet. The IP address of your iPhone can be found from “Share” tab of your iPhone.

Finding/Matching locations for the photos from your digital camera

Open your digital photos using GeoTag Desktop. GeoTag Desktop will automatically match up the photos with the places where they were taken. If you collected locations by photo names, the “tagged location” will be applied to the photos. If you used the automatic collection mode, then the “estimated location” will be applied to your photos.

The estimation mode uses your camera’s date and time. So, it is important to match the date and time of your digital camera and your iPhone. Many of decent digital cameras also allow you to setup time zone. If your camera supports time zone, you will also need to match this with your iPhone. However, you can always define your camera’s time zone in the GeoTag Desktop later.

Adding locations to your digital photos

Click “Add GeoTags” button to complete the geotagging process. Later, when you import them to iLife ’09 or Flickr, your photos will be positioned on a map, communicating exactly where the photos were taken.