Saturday, July 25, 2009

Nokia E75 "Teach the Technophobe" week three

The third challenge from WOM World/Nokia only arrived today. A new sticker had to be sent out which was why I got it late. If you do not know, this is part of the 'Teach the Technophobe' E75 competition. I'll be out an about today, hopefully getting my technophobe to capture a nice picture for the challenge. Until then you can read about my past challenges here.

As I mentioned earlier, the E75 has the ability to geotag pictures taken. This is a simple enough process that involves turning on the GPS receiver and enabling location tagging withing the camera settings. Obviously this depends on whether the GPS receiver on the E75 has acquired its position. This can take up to a couple of minutes depending on location (outdoors works best) and the weather. Any co-ordinates will be recorded as a metadata on the image's EXIF.

Geotagging images has plenty of advantages. The most obvious is a way or organising your images by location. If you share images on Flickr, location tags will allow users to quickly trawl through images based on location. You can also use online maps like Google Maps to create an interactive map.

BTW, if your Series 60 phone has no support for geotagging (my E51 does not), an application like ViewRanger is a good alternative. Whilst it does not tag the images taken with the E51's camera with co-ordinates, you are able to upload images to ViewRanger's server. Images can be shared on ViewRanger's TravelLog site, which shows an interactive map with pin-points representing images.

Anyway, an update. My partner has just completed the third challenge. Basically the challenge calls for the technophobe to send me an e-mail of a picture taken of herself, and if possible a link to a map of where she took the picture. The reason why I wrote about the geotagging ability of the E75 is precisely that - it is much easier to let your images be tagged automatically so you can go through them later in pin-pointing exactly where each image was taken. When I brought the E75 to the Lake District, I had the GPS turn on for GPS logging and picture taking. You can see some of the results here. As I said earlier, the E75 is a good camera phone, but it won't replace your dedicated digital camera or even a high end camera phone like the N86.

So back to the challenge. As you know it has been a rainy day and she e-mailed me a picture of her all wet and pouting from her lunch walk. Privacy concerns meant that I won't be posting the picture up here, nor a link to Google Maps of where she works. Sorry.

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