The uber geeks

Regarding the “hidden” geotagging iPhoto feature

There has been some chitty-chat on the Internets about iPhoto having a hidden feature that allows you to Geotag your photos.

This might be true, but this really isn’t a hidden “feature” at all. iPhoto simply has the ability to, but is currently being locked-out of being able to, store geographic meta data for your photos. Oh, and it has a little button turned off that goes to Google Maps with the Lat/Long appended to the end of the URL. This is not a feature really - but it might be a preclude to something coming in the future which we could call a feature.

See, this might all be a case of nomenclature but I would call a hidden feature a full-fledged feature that was simply hidden for a reason. For instance if you downloaded a trial version of an application that had several of its features disabled until you bought a copy - and you figured out a way to hack the preference file to enable those features - that’d be hidden features. But what this iPhoto thing is better categorized as is “an unfinished feature”.

I have a few worries though. I want, more than anything at this point, a camera that stores geo information as I take photos. Obviously there are solutions for this out there already, I simply don’t have the budget at this point. So, if iPhoto had a way to add that information to my photos - that’d at least be a start. However, if the current representation is anywhere close to the final representation of this feature - we’re in trouble. Most people have no idea how to find Lat/Long information for their photos. Flickr makes this easy by using the Yahoo! Maps API to drop your photos on a map and automatically storing your geo information on drop - great. Can iPhoto follow suit? I’m not so sure it is that easy.

At this point, almost everything you can do within iPhoto (short of ordering prints) can be done offline. I can rotate, adjust, rename, tag, create albums, etc. with my photos all without an Internet connection. If Apple got in bed with Google to make a way to do the same type of thing Flickr has - I would be forced to be online in order to add geo information to my photos. Bummer!

Don’t get me wrong, it’d be a great feature to be able to drag my photos ontop of a map representing where I took the photos and it autofilling all of the geo information for me. But not having all of that information offline would suck. Say you take your Black Macbook to your parents house to show them the latest photos of your vacation. You’ve done countless hours of work prior to this slideshow - cropping, editing, adjusting colors, tagging, and geotagging so that you have everything perfect. Then, when you get to your parents (who do not have a connection to the Internet), you can’t show them where you took the photos on a map because the Google API, while awesome, does not work so well with no connection.

One of the biggest “problems” I have with the Flickr + Yahoo! Maps implementation is that it does not follow the typical “Web 2.0″ standards. Namely; the average joe can’t get their geo information about their photos back out of Flickr no matter how long they spend dragging and dropping. I suppose this caveat is much worse than not being able to pull up the map of your photos when offline - but it is a caveat that I’m not looking forward to nonetheless.

I’m looking forward to extended geo features in iPhoto, but I’m anxious to see how well their implemented for use offline.

This article has been cross posted on Newsvine.

Recent features

• Leah Andreone - Break Your Fall
• Coheed and Cambria - The Velorium Camper II: Backend Of Forever
• The Format - Give It Up

Song of the week

Sara Bareilles - Between the Lines
Sara Bareilles' "Between the Lines" is the Song of the Week for April 20 to 26.