As a photographer I love to "geotag" my photos when I travel. Not only do I think it's a neat technology, I just like the fact that I'll be able to more easily answer the "where was that photo taken?" question. I've given this tip a number of differnt times during presentations and in other posts, but I thought it was time to update it and give some additional tips.
The Problem: Your camera doesn't have a built-in or external GPS
If you're shooting with a regular point and shoot or DSLR camera, chances are it doesn't have a built-in GPS chip. Although there are a few cameras out there that do have them, the vast majority do not have them. On the other hand the cameras in your iPhone and WiFi+3G iPad do have actual GPS chips in them. This means that by defualt every picture you take is tagged with Location Information in the metadata of the image. Your various desktop applications like iPhoto, Lightroom, Aperture, Preview, etc. can use this information and display a map pointing out where the photo was taken. The question becomes how do you get this Location information into the shots that you took with a camera that doesn't have a GPS chip in it?
There are a few ways to do it
iPhoto – chances are as a Mac user you already have iPhoto. iPhoto is a photo management tool and whether you use it to manage your photos or not, you can use its easy ability to "copy" location information and "Paste Location" information into other photos. The tip is to simply take at least one iPhone/iPad 2 photo at each location and then go ahead and shoot with your regular camera. When you get back to your computer, import both the iPhone shots and your regular shots into iPhoto. Now just highlight the iPhone shot and choose Copy from the Edit menu. Select all the photos taken at the same location with your other camera and right-click on them and choose Paste Location. iPhoto will add the location information to each of those photos. Aperture can do this too.
HoudahGeo – While the "free" iPhoto option works fine, I actually prefer to do this with HoudahGeo. I don't use iPhoto to manage my photos. i use Lightroom. Importing and exporting the shots into iPhoto adds too many steps to my workflow just to get Location Information into my DSLR shots. HoudahGeo is a stand alone application that can add Location information to your images from a vareity of different sources including other images. This means that I can import images into Lightroom as I always do, then I can drag those same images into HoudahGeo. I can choose one of my iPhone shots and copy and paste the coordinates from the iPhone shoot to all my RAW (DNG) files. Once I go back to Lightroom I just tell Lightroom to update the metadata from the images. Done!
the shot above is being displayed in Lightroom with GPS info. Click the image to see it on the map!
Check out HoudahGeo here
Geotag as you shoot – My favorite method is to simply geotag my photos as i take them. As a Nikon DSLR shooter I have the benefit of having GPS "support" built right in to my Nikon DSLRs. The only thing that's missing is the actual GPS unit. Nikon doesn't build the actual GPS modules into their DSLRs yet. Instead you have to plug in an external module. There are several to choose from and no matter which one you go with, you can then just shoot! Just like with your iPhone, your Nikon DSLR images will be tagged with Location Information as you take them.
Here are some Nikon Compatible GPS units. Here's one that let's you use your iPhone's GPS via Bluetooth and another that uses a separate small GPS unit as you shoot with your DSLR. Pretty Slick!
Once those photos are geotagged now what?
Once you get the Location Information into your photos chances are you'll be ready to display this information. There are several ways to do it. First off and back to iPhoto. iPhoto can display your photos on a Map. That's what the Places feature is. Not only that iPhoto can use this in your slideshows and photo books too. This is also built-in to your iOS devices Photos App too. In Lightroom you can click the little arrow next to the coordinates and it will fire up your browser and show you the location on Google Maps. If you upload the photos to Flickr (and adjust your privacy settings) your photos will automatically be mapped as well. Even the Preview App can show you a map of your photos and show them to you on Google Maps. Those are just a few ways to see where your photos were taken.
There are several companies out there that will let you create and design your own wall calendars via their websites. As many of you know iPhoto has this feature built-in too. Although I don't use iPhoto as my photo manager (I use Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3), I do go through the extra step each year of exporting out my favorite potential calendar pics from Lightroom and import them into iPhoto just to produce my calendar. I do this because iPhoto has two features that I have yet to find in other services. The first one came in a few years ago and it was one that I couldn't believe that no one else offered.
It's the simple ability of allowing you to put a photo on the actual days of the week. I do this for family member's birthdays. When iPhoto got this feature a few versions ago, I said "duh, why doesn't anyone else get the need for this?"
The next feature is the integration with iCal. Since I keep my calendars in iCal, iPhoto can automatically import any of my calendars onto my printed calendar too. I do this with my Birthdays calendar from Address Book birthdays and the US Holidays Calendar. I also import the MacGroup calendar too so that all the meeting dates are printed on the calendar. Even if you import a calendar and you don't want certain items from it on the printed calendar (ie. meetings that may change), you can delete the individual items that you don't want after the calendar has been imported.
You might think that this is an unfair advantage that Apple has over other companies because the two apps are running on the Mac. It's not unfair at all. If other calendar printing services really wanted to offer this they could allow you to export out your dates from any calendar that you use or even the iCal format and import them in via the web.
Start it and end it where you want
Lastly I got off to a late start this year. Normally I do the calendars and submit the order in time to get them back by January 1. This time I was behind schedule and I realized that with the holidays and other December activities that I never have time to work on it in December. So I opted to add on a 13th month this time. My new calendar runs from January 2011 to January 2012 giving me a few extra weeks of breathing room before doing the February 2012 – January 2013 calendars next year 
You can now buy iPhoto '11 separately for only $14.99 here from the Mac 
Although I use Adobe Photoshop Lightroom to manage my photos it doesn't really matter what you use, you have to take control! It's great that we've reached a point in technology that we can have literally thousands of photos on our hard drives and hundreds if not thousands on our portable devices. However, if you don't take control now you're headed for trouble.
Every time you take out that digital camera of yours and start firing you're going to have dozens if not hundreds of images to import. You'll import them, look at them, pick out your favorites and share them with friends and family either electronically or via printed projects. Great! However, what about the shots that weren't your favorites? Do you keep them? If you do, it won't take too long before your computer will slow to a crawl. Although programs like iPhoto are rated to handle over 250,000 images in a library, that doesn't mean that it's a pleasurable experience. Even if you have a super fast computer that can keep up, the question is why keep photos that aren't your favorites?
Did you get the shot?
As a photographer, that's the question I constantly ask myself on every shoot that I do. Because shooting digitally is so easy you may have a tendency to over shoot an event. What I mean by over shooting is taking dozens or hundreds of photos of the same scene, person, etc. Don't get me wrong, I know that sometimes (if not most times) it may take several frames before you're happy. However, once you've got it MOVE ON! Either move on to the next thing or change up the shot.
Tips to keep the number of shots down
Edit in camera - If you take a shot and look at the LCD and immediately realize that shot is NOT GOOD and you have the opportunity to take it again to get a better one, immediately delete the one that's not good. This way when you get back to your computer you'll have less shots to import and the ones you import will be good for the most part.
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