phreemms GPS/Geotagging info

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GPS / Goetagging

With modern phones nowadays, a lot of them have a built in GPS facility where it is possible to 'tag' your photos with your current location. This data is stored within your picture and is known as 'exif' data. This data can then be read and some clever things can be done with it. One of those things is the ability to extract the location information from it and display that location within Google Maps. This is a new feature we have launched on phreemms. So long as your image is tagged with the correct data, a satellite icon will appear under the picture. Click this icon and you will be taken to Google Maps.

Depending on the hardware you have (phone, PDA etc) depends on whether you can do this.

An example of what we mean can be found here

Depending on the hardware you have depends on how you can achieve this. The newer Nokia phones have integrated GPS (N82, N95, 6110 Navigator, N810, E90 etc) as do some smartphones such as the Asus P526 or MIO A701. You can then load applications onto the phone that will enable you to take tagged photos. One such application is the (free) Nokia Location Tagger. This simply adds your GPS co-ordinates (Longitude, Latitude & Sea Elevation) to the photo. You can't actually see this data when you look at the picture, you need a special program or write some code to extract the data from within the picture. This is what we do here.

If you don't have an integrated GPS, it's just as easy to use an external bluetooth GPS receiver. These are very cheap nowadays and can be bought all over the Internet, including everyone's favourite auction site. You can then run an application on your device which will in turn connect to your bluetooth GPS and perform the same function. Many external GPS receivers are more accurate than integrated ones.

If you are interested in trying out this feature and would like some help in setting it up, please post a message in the GPS section of our forum and we'll be happy to help you. One problem we have noticed is that when sending in a picture to the site via MMS, unless you send in the full-sized original image, the GPS data won't stay intact. This is due to the resizing process removing the necessary data. So if you want to send in a tagged image via MMS, you should send the full sized original - check your MMS settings for "Image Size" and make sure it says "Original". Please bear in mind that if you do this, you'll be sending a lot more data over the network which is likely to incur a higher data charge from your phone network. Of course, what you could do, is lower the size of the original image in your camera settings - knock it down to say 640x480 and the image size should be arounbd 100kb. The cheapest possible way to do it would be to email the picture to us - if you're not already on the email list, please send Phree a private message in the forum with the specific email address you would like to send your images from and he will add you to the list and reply to you with the email address to send your images to.