Flickr, the photo-sharing website from Yahoo, will actually import the geotags from the photo files and catalogue your photo gallery according to the geotags (one of the benefits of having a standard format for the tags). You can even add geotags to a website to help with its search engine optimization. It began in the still photo realm as a natural extension of shooting and uploading photos with GPS-enabled cell phones. Until this happens, geotagging applications are developing along separate but parallel paths. There is a growing movement to create a standard format for video geotags, which would make all geotags compatible, and allow for the ability upload the Sony geotagged files and have them automatically read by Google Earth, for example. A map pulled up on the camcorder touchscreen will indicate locations where footage is tagged, and by selecting the tag icon, the video from that location will play back.Ī bonus is you can use the camcorder as an actual interactive GPS to find out exactly where you are. Video footage shot on these camcorders will be automatically embedded with a very precise GPS geotag. On these Sony models, the maps are by Navteq, which also provides GPS-enabled maps for Garmin, BMW and Nokia. This necessitates you use it somewhat differently. On a GPS-enabled camcorder – such as Sony models HDR-TG5V, HDR-XR520V or HDR-XR200V – the map comes embedded in the camcorder, and the data is not yet formatted to be compatible with Google Earth or other open-source interactive maps. If, however, all the videos you shoot are tagged with your hometown because, well, you live there, then the geotag is less impactful on the meaning of the content.Īlso, because you manually tag the videos with location data once it is uploaded, the Google Earth-tagged video tends to lack the precision available with a GPS-enabled camcorder. Whether it’s giraffes in Tanzania, triathletes in Hawaii, karaoke bars in Tokyo, or slums in New Delhi, a geotag can add richness and meaning to your video content if the content is tagged to a relevant place. Once Google finished designing the interface to allow easy online search and navigation of various views of our world, it purchased YouTube and promptly incorporated video geotags into its platform.ĭownload the latest version of Google Earth and enable the YouTube layer in the Galleries menu, and you can see the thousands of geotagged videos on YouTube that are affiliated with a particular place on Earth (or Mars, or the Moon, for that matter).ĭepending on the context, this can be either incredibly useful or incredibly meaningless.įor example, travel video, documentary video, or video with some other geographic theme or relevance, is ideally suited for geotags. No application does a better (or bigger) job bringing a map into the real world – or vice versa – than Google Earth. In short, geotagging “facilitates the sorting, finding and sharing of media based on the location where it was captured,” according to Geotate, one of the original video geotagging technology enabling companies.Ī good map is an important part of a geotag’s usefulness, which makes perfect sense considering the tag relates the video to a map location or coordinate. An embedded tag that includes information about where and when the footage was shot, accurate to NASA satellite specifications, can be an extremely valuable post-production tool. With a GPS-enabled camcorder, shot logging becomes a snap. You might be surprised where video comes from.Ĭan also be useful in the video production process. It doesn’t do much good to sort by place unless there’s corresponding video topics to choose from once you get there.Īnother good use of a video geotag is to “reverse search” from the video content itself to identify where the video was shot. It’s also important to have a name or some other indication of the video subject matter included in the tag as well. Now, when you or someone else goes to that map, you can see the video geotags that relate the video with the place, usually in the form of the ubiquitous map-marking thumbtack or some other obvious icon. Here’s the general idea: Embed your video with a geotag and then mark that place on an interactive map, usually online (such as Google Earth), but sometimes within the camcorder itself (like on the touch-screen display of the various Sony GPS-enabled camcorders).
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