Geotagging is the process of adding data to your digital photos to indicate the latitude and longitude where the photo was taken.
The digital photos you take already have a great deal of data stored with them. This “metadata” helps define and categorize the photo. The music on your iPod offers a good analogy; each song contains embedded information that includes the name of the artist the songwriter, the musical genre, and perhaps even artwork and lyrics.
Similarly, a jpeg image also has embedded information. The metadata in a jpeg can include the camera make and model, date and time the photo was taken, lens settings, information about the software that was used and, increasingly, a geotag that shows where the photo was taken. A growing number of cameras add geotags to each photo, and photos taken with a GPS-enabled smartphone almost always include a geotag.
This is both good news and bad. The good news is that geotagging helps you remember where you took a photo. You could use this technology, for example, to take pictures of properties for your records, or to make note of amenities or interesting architecture in your neighborhood. Later, the geotags will allow you to view the photos on a map, and to see the location and the address where each photo was taken—great for searching, organizing and displaying the images.
But the downside is that photos of your home, your family, and friends that you post on, say, Facebook or Twitter, may also contain a geotag. Photos taken at your home, for example, will contain information that shows exactly where you live. Photos taken and posted while you’re on vacation will advertise loudly that you’re 1,000 miles away. You may not know how to extract the metadata from the photos you post on the Internet, but lots of would-be cybercriminals do.
Therefore, it’s a good idea to know how to turn off the geotagging feature on your cameras and smartphone, so that it only works when you want it to. Click here to find out more.
