PlanetEye

February 11th, 2008

Cameras with GPS: When, How?

Mark Evans

Director, Community

By Mark Evans

While geotagging and GPS are gaining more momentum among photographers, a key piece missing from the equation is cameras that come equipped with GPS functionality. There’s a little bit of activity but it still seems like onboard GPS is not going to happen as a standard feature soon.

Underexposed’s Stephen Shankland recently interview Canon’s Chuck Westfall at the Photo Marketing Association Trade Show. Among the topics they touched upon were GPS. Here’s an excerpt from the interview.

Q: Geotagging is a hot subject, and much of the discussion at the PMA show seems to have moved from when it will arrive in cameras rather than whether it will. When do you think it will?

Westfall: The desirability of that feature is quite clear. You can see reasons why–classifying, sorting, and searching photos–especially with the advances in technology starting to appear that is taking advantage of the (location) information. That’s why we started putting in the optional capability with the wireless transmitters (accessories available for higher-end Canon SLRs).

Q: How far away is the geotagging era?
Westfall: There’s no doubt we’ll see cameras with built-in GPS within the next two years, possibly sooner. I’m not able to give guidance regarding Canon specifically.

Q: Are you getting pressure to add geotagging support from Web sites such as Google and Yahoo that enable users to make use of geotagged photos?
Westfall: Mostly we’re hearing from the vertical markets–professional, commercial, and industrial applications. And the military.

Q: Some envision geotagging as an aspect of “autotagging,” in which a rich set of metadata is recorded when the photograph is taken. It might be possible to combine face recognition with autotagging to label photos automatically.

Westfall: With our PowerShot line, we started autotagging a year ago. We call it “My Category.” It has a total of five or six presets and three customizable tags. When you choose a scene mode, it associates for example a “landscape” tag. It can be done in review, too–you can apply it after the fact. For a camera with face recognition, we know when people are present. This will become much more valuable in the future. Facial recognition is a very powerful feature.

Technorati Tags: Geotagging, GPS, Photography

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