geotagging

NEW YORK--Be warned: If you take a snapshot with your iPhone or other camera-enabled gadget, it may divulge more information about you than your photographic abilities.

At the Next HOPE hacker conference here on Friday, a security researcher demonstrated how he scanned over 2.5 million photo links posted to Twitter and extracted exact latitude and longitude coordinates embedded in over 65,000 photos -- typically without the user's knowledge.

"It's a privacy fail," says Ben Jackson of Mayhemic Labs, who plans to release the software and data collection this evening.

It works this way: the … Read more

With three updates now out of the way since its debut in February, Apple's Aperture 3 is ready for prime time, and I recommend the software.

The $199 software is geared for photography enthusiasts and professionals, especially those who shoot raw images rather than just JPEG, and I put the software through its paces for several weeks for a review. My overall opinion: It's solid software that produces very nice images.

If you're an iPhoto user who wants more, it's a good upgrade, though it costs $199 new. If you're an Aperture 2 user, it'… Read more

Facebook is reportedly adding a new feature that would let its users share their location in their status updates.

The new location feature, described Friday in a story by Advertising Age, would debut later this month and let people automatically include their current locale in their postings if they choose to do so.

Stung by concerns and complaints about customer privacy and new features that are turned on by default, Facebook is likely to offer the location feature on an opt-in basis, according to Ad Age.

Certainly, many of Facebook's more than 100 million users might find it useful … Read more

OLD WINDSOR, U.K.--I like computers. I like maps. I like drawing. And in one gestalt moment at 10:36 p.m. last Thursday, these affinities all came together.

As I entered a neighborhood park for a nighttime stroll after the kid was in bed, firing up a GPS application on my phone to keep track of my exercise, it occurred to me: Why not use the phone to create and record a path I could show as a design on a map?

So I did. I chose a basic pattern, spiraling in from the periphery to the center. … Read more

Google's Picasa is an excellent photo organizer. One of my favorite features, though, is its capability to quickly geotag images--adding longitude and latitude to the photo's EXIF metadata--with little effort. Basically, it requires little more than selecting a photo or photos, clicking a couple of buttons in the interface, and the software handles the rest. Plus, you can use either Google Maps for tagging or place them on the Google Earth globe.

The biggest catch is, unless you noted it at the time, you have to remember approximately where you were when you took your photos. Once you'… Read more

Though it's not quite a year since Sony announced the HDR-CX12 flash-memory-based AVCHD camcorder, it looks like it's time for a replacement. With a six month lag behind their hard-drive based siblings, the HDR-XR500V and HDR-XR520V, the HDR-CX500V, and the HDR-CX520V promise some much-needed enhancements over their solid-but-flawed brothers.

The two models, which differ only by built-in memory--the 500V has 32GB while the 520V includes 64GB--use the same Exmor-R back-illuminated sensor and G-series 12X zoom lens as the XR versions, so we expect them to deliver the same high-quality video, and both retain the novelty geotagging capability for … Read more

Garmin has just announced its newest outdoor handheld GPS units, the Oregon 550 and 550t.

The new units pack a 3-inch, color touch screen and a high-sensitivity GPS chipset into a rugged, waterproof casing that should withstand the bumps and splashes of Mother Nature.

Not only will the Oregon 550/550t get you where you're going, it will also help you remember what you saw while you were there. A 3.2-MP autofocus digital camera is wedged into the mix, so you can capture photos of the great outdoors. We haven't seen any test photos to discern the … Read more

About a year ago Sony introduced the Handycam HDR-TG1, a painfully pricey pistol-grip camcorder with relatively decent specs for its tiny, titanium, travel-sized body: 1920x1080 AVCHD video, 2.7-inch touch-screen LCD, 10X zoom optically stabilized lens and a 2.4-megapixel ClearVid Exmor CMOS sensor. Now Sony's replacing it with the HDR-TG5, still overly expensive with almost identical insides and outsides, but updated with 16GB built-in memory and geotagging support with Navteq maps. The company's tweaked the menu interface and added its Smile Shutter technology as well.

On one hand, I'm a fan of geotagging and it's … Read more

Aside from having a cool name, German company Foolography has an interesting geotagging solution that takes advantage of the GPS connector on Nikon cameras. Its Unleashed is a tiny Bluetooth receiver that works with any Bluetooth-compatible GPS receiver to directly insert the location coordinates into the EXIF header of the digital camera files.

Nikon has its own solution, the GP-1, but it's a bit bulkier and ties you into its GPS device. Though the Unleashed will be more expensive--250 euros, or about $315 using today's exchange rate--it offers the flexibility of using any quality of GPS device you … Read more