1. What is geotagging?
Hunting through shoeboxes, photo albums and hard drives, is not an exciting customer experience. Few of us have the patience to describe the digital image by adding metadata to the digital file header because it's time consuming and fiddly. And consequently, many of our memories are consigned to forgotten corners of cyber space.
Of course it doesn't have to be like this. Photographs are defined by the time and place they were taken:
- that weekend in Paris,
- the road trip along the Pacific Highway,
- camping on the slopes of Mont Blanc,
- or that beach in Ko Samui.
And when the camera automatically adds the place or geotag to the photo, a new customer experience is built. This is the world of geotagging and it's driving a third way in the Digital Imaging Industry: the starting point for the consumers' web journey.
Context
A geotag describes the geographic context for an object: the latitude, longitude, altitude, road name etc… For example, click below to find out where this picture was taken.
Search & Organisation
Today millions of people painstakingly (manually) add the geo-context to organise and search their digital albums. And as photo collections grow rapidly, specific images are difficult to retrieve without some form of “universally” understood cataloguing system.
Geotagged photos form a natural bridge between how people lodge events in their consciousness and how machines search across their data banks; a common cataloguing method for people and machines.
In turn, Information that we discover about a photograph using time and location aids the album organisation experience. Users will search for photos by proximity to a location, and other arbitrary details they may remember, such as the temperature.
Sharing
Geotagging is also a common search method for other people, transcending cultural and linguistic barriers – a universal common denominator.
Geotagging helps add friends', family, professional and even complete strangers' photographs to “our” memory bank.
For example, if you want to add more photographs from last week's rock concert — after the event — we use our geotags to discover photos taken by other people in the audience.
Discovery
Traditionally, the Digital Imaging Industry generated revenue from camera sales and printing. But Digital Images (still and moving) are a growing source of “user generated web content” (UGC) that provide the commercial basis for many Web 2.0 organisations such as Google, Yahoo and News Corp.
Photos are the obvious starting point for the consumers’ web journey which augments the camera sales and printing revenue, although like the Music Industry before it, the major brands in the Imaging Industry need to work hard to recapture the commercial opportunities that new entrants pioneered.
Click "What's happening here?" to see how a consumer’s web journey begins.
The photo of Beckham scoring in the World Cup was taken by Georgio and is reproduced under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license. The concert pictures were taken by Josh McConnell and are reproduced under the Creative Commons no derivative works license.