Geocoding

This page will introduce you to the fascinating topic of geocoding photos and using Google Earth and Google Maps to display them.

Simply put, geocoding is the process of adding location information to the metadata stored in your photo. Metadata is the EXIF and IPTC information that is stored inside the file that contains your photo. The most common place to store this location information is in the EXIF data. For a more detailed description of Geocoding have a look at this article in Wikipedia The location information is the position on the earth in longitude and latitude coordinates. You don't need to know the format of this information as this will be taken care of by the software we will use to add the coordinates to the EXIF information.

You do, however, have to know the location where your photos were taken. If you are lucky enough to have a camera with a built-in GPS or a camera that can interface to a GPS, then the process of geocoding your photos is very easy - simply enable the GPS and let the camera add the coodinates when you take the photo. You will have to have a satelite fix for this to happen.

So what about most of us who do not have such a camera or even a GPS unit? Well, never fear because Google will come to the rescue as we will explain later.

If you have Google Earth installed on your computer then simply click here Australia 2006 in Google Earth and load the downloaded file into Google Earth. If you browser gives you the option to open the file in Google Earth then simply do that.