Imagine this. You're on vacation in Japan, and you climb Mt Fuji. Triumphant at the top, you snap your picture. Your camera automatically tags your picture with your location, and when you upload your picture to your computer all the location data is right there! Geotagging allows you to tag your pictures with your location, typically latitude an longitude, and sometimes place names. At PMA on 30 Jan, Geotate announced the availability of its Capture and Process GPS solution, in Q1/2008. Geotate caches the GPS signals, and then when you get back to your computer, it uses a web service to deliver the geotag for your pictures. So no more head scratching on where exactly your were when you took that picture in the amazon jungle.
This has implications beyond your scrapbook as well. Online photo sharing sites like Flickr allow you to tag manually, they should support the new technology once it becomes widespread. Imagine being able to see all the public photos for "Costa Rica" or any location in public searches. Or how about microblogging, which is primarily text based, with pictures? Near real time posts of your vacation on your blog...cool.
Tags: digital camera, geotagging, geotate