Our choice for niftiest feature in the iPhone 3G isn’t the eponymous 3G like most people’s is, hey WiFi is faster still and the original iPhone has that; it’s the GPS functionality. For quite a while now we’ve been intrigued by the possibilities of geotagged photos, but never got around to spending the couple thousand worth of gear or putting up with the annoying track log/timestamp reconciliation process that it would have taken up until now; and hey it would have been a waste if we had, because what do you know, the iPhone’s Camera app will do that now! Just allow it to when it asks, and it’ll embed the GPS latitude and longitude coordinates in standard EXIF format. Not altitude apparently, but oh well.
And we were even more pleased to find that there’s a readily available method to make some use of that info right now: it’s called “Flickr” which I imagine you are familiar with already! Just go into the privacy settings and allow it to dig into the EXIF tags and share your location information, and you’re all set.
Let’s take a look at what it does with this photo off our balcony we uploaded exactly as taken. Observe that over on the right it provides the links
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Taken in Vancouver, British Columbia (map)
- Taken with an Apple iPhone.
More properties
It would have been really awesome if it had some way of determining which way by the compass it was pointed as well as the angle up or down. Then it would be feasible to make a distributed system that would take photos from tons of different people of the same landmark and automatically generate a 3-d model of it and other cool things.
btw I got my iphone 3g yesterday too! There was a total of 28 available in Vernon on friday morning, and rogers had crashed making us wait more than 3 hours to get it activated. Now all I have to do is get my iphone developer status approved by apple. Any hints on how to accelerate this process?
–jeffy
I haven’t stumbled across any specs on exactly what the GPS hardware is yet. But if it’s capable of getting at least four satellite signals, that should be good enough for a foot resolution, so you ought to be able to get a second distinct coordinate just by extending your arm forward, and that would be good enough to get a vector from. Hmmmm … “Compass.app” … wonder if anyone’s done that yet?
As for developer status, nope, it’s just complete blind luck far as anyone ever managed to figure out. But they do seem to have opened the floodgates remarkably since Thursday.
iphone 3g reviewr does geotagging! at Under The Bridge