I’m sorry that one was missed on the show notes.

Here you go: http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/multi_page.asp?cid=6007

Thanks for listening.

Antonio – a GPS receiver takes a reading every 15 seconds, not whenever you take a picture. If you take pictures between readings (which is what normally happens), the tagging software extrapolates your position at the time of the shot by comparing the two adjoining GPS readings.

For taking a bearing you need a compass, not a GPS. What’s the point of mixing these two unrelated discussions? This is similar to starting a discussion on whether you should have seat belts in your car, and then saying you’d rather have a car radio.

The question is not whether GPS information has to be in every picture, but whether it is useful for some. And there are some situations when it is darn useful.

Flickr, by the way, does not by default display the geotags for your pictures for anybody but yourself. There is no danger for your privacy, unless you explicitly make the positioning readable to others (a setting which you can change, if you wish, on a per-picture basis).

Rather than an all around complaint about how bad geotagging is, I think your listeners would have benefited from a discussion about when you should not geotag (e.g. when you’re photographing your baby).

I have a hard time following the discussion about the “mystique” of a photograph, and how adding geotags is overloading the picture with useless data and distracting the viewer from viewing the picture. Sorry? If that’s the what you’re worried about then you should eliminate all EXIF data from your pictures. Naming the camera, exposure, aperture, focal length, lens, image manipulation software and other data stored in your EXIF data is taking away much more of the mystery of the photo than two geographical codes which you cannot even make sense of without going into Google Earth or something like that.

But what baffles me most is that nobody thought of the advantages that geotagging can bring to photographers: share your photos with others based on location and region. When you’re preparing for a trip, you can view pictures of this location to get an idea what to find there, and to research how other photographers have handled the challenges you’re likely to find. When you’re out there hiking, the geotags can help you identify where you took which picture.

Anyway – love your show, but this episode did not measure up to your usual standards.

As mentioned in the podcast, its another layer of rich information. For a second lets pretend EXIF doesn’t exist and manufacturers are just now showing it as an accessory, would you start saying… well it’s not really useful because I take photos of pets etc or EXIF takes up data which adds up and lets you take that many less photos (Just pretend we are still on small capacity cards), would you suggest “EXIF accessories” to be optional or would you demand it to be a part of the camera and thus through further version revisions it gets smarter, cheaper and more useful?