I use Flickr a lot. I have over 12,000 photos on my Flickr account, with over 500 coming from my iPhone alone (with over 2,000 on my iPhone as mentioned in this post). I was enamored when the GPS-toting iPhone 3G came out as I assumed my photos would automatically be geotagged when I uploaded them to Flickr. Unfortunately that was not the case and the only way to have Flickr geotag those photos was either by using a third-party iPhone application to do the uploading or upload the original file once you’ve gotten iPhoto to grab it. This seemed like a big hassle to me as I almost never sync my iPhone with my computer. All I do is charge it with the wall charger.
My primary method of uploading images to Flickr from my iPhone has always been simply emailing them to my Flickr contact, which uses the special Flickr upload email address. As such I didn’t want to be bothered with changing my ways to get automatic geotagging working. Thanks to a new post on the Flickr blog, I won’t have to do anything differently to have photos from my iPhone automatically geotagged on Flickr.
If you already upload to Flickr from your iPhone, you’ll need to change your geotagging privacy settings to allow Flickr to geotag your photos based on the included exif GPS data.
Now that I have that setup for my iPhone, I’ve noticed the GPS data on the photos is anywhere from 1/2 a block to 5 blocks off in terms of accuracy. Does anyone know how often the iPhone updates its location? With the Maps application open, it’s almost instantaneous but it seems this is not the case with applications that request location data.
Do you do a lot of photo uploading from your mobile phone?
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I stumbled upon this feature yesterday when I saw my T-Mobile G1’s photos had geo data in them. I figured Flickr must have a way to auto-geotag using that info, and sure enough, they did. Very cool.
I don’t know about the iPhone, but the problem with the G1 is that the GPS really drains the battery, so I leave it off. So I must remember to turn on the GPS, wait to find my location, then take a photo. Or else it will try to triangulate my location, which isn’t very accurate (but better than nothing).
It’s my first smartphone with a camera, and I love being able to capture something and immediately share it. I’ll probably end up writing my own mail script, but currently I’m trying out http://tarpipe.com/ (its like yahoo pipes for your social network posts), so you can post to flickr then tweet the flickr url in one shot.
Could you give a little detail as to how you got it working? I’m about to restore this friggin G1 to get photo’s to geotag.
Yes, I’ve gone into settings and select to add my location to photos.
Yes, I’ve waiting with GPS on to pinpoint my location before snapping photo’s. Nothing works….so desperate.
Amazing post. Totally just made my iPhone and Flickr even more useful.
Keep up the good work!
~Matt
Nice…thanks for the tip!
“anywhere from 1/2 a block to 5 blocks off in terms of accuracy”
Interesting. When I was in France earlier this year my jPhone tagged my photos as being taken anywhere between Mexico and Brazil.
@Neil – I think there was a bug initially that flipped the longitude and latitude.. or something along those lines.. do you see that this is still the case?
Pretty much all the photos on my flickr account are from my iphone. Nice to know I don’t have to go back and geotag everything by hand now.
Wow! Thanks, Paul! This has been a frustration/disappointment for a long time.
I uses AirMe (iphone app) on my iPhone to take pictures and upload to flickr. You can set up your flickr account, so that it will automatically upload to flickr each time you snap a photo. It also saves that photo to your phone’s photo library. There is also a “post to twitter” feature, which will append a link to the photo on flickr. Needless to say, I have really enjoyed it so far. Oh, and the geotagging is awesome too. Regardless of how they’re uploaded, it’s awesome.
I’ve seen the iPhone geotagging be as much as a mile off. Most handheld GPS units can be pretty wobbly for the first minute or so after you power them up.
My theory: If there isn’t a viable cell-tower placement or known WiFi signal to give a better location, then the phone is going to have to use the poor-quality GPS signal until it straightens itself out. If you use Maps or leave it in Camera mode for a while before shooting, then you may get a more accurate location.
wow that’s fascinating that you don’t sync ur phone at all. i think sync is one of the reasons why i like iphone over g1, but then again i used to hate sync or using itunes/iphoto at all so i guess i can see why you wouldn’t sync.
There’s now also an iPhone app called GeoLogTag that you can use to geotag photos taken with any digital camera. The app integrates nicely with Flickr. I bought it and accuracy is around 10 meters which is pretty good.
Does anyone know if this works with the first gen iPhone that does not have GPS? Will it just tag it based on the cell towers?
Thanks Paul, this is all I needed to get my geotags to work!
I am not sure why your reading is so off, were you moving while you were taking the photo?
All the best,
Phil
Clintus,
from my experience: Yes, it can. I have got an 1st generation iPhone with 1.3 firmware, and recently synced some of my photos with my Mac. One of them was perfectly geo-positioned to the right spot. It was in front of a public building, with a big street directly near-by. So, I assume this was done based on some geotagged WiFi my iPhone found.
Uh, not 1.3. The firmware on my phone is 2.1
Greetings! On the other side of the coin, there viewing geotagged photos can be a pain without resorting to severe filtering. Respotter is an iPhone app I’m looking for feedback on which tries to geographically organize lots of photos according to zoom level so you can start at an entire world view, then zoom into a particular region to see more. Sort of like what zillow does with state/county/zipcode except on a global scale. Anyway, hope someone finds it useful! It currently has flickr (as well as panoramio and picasa) as a feed. More to follow if there’s interest.