I believe adding location metadata or "geotagging" images via mobile devices is a currently underused feature - in particularly, the use of geotagging has yet to really gain a foothold within the business world. Many businesses rely on capturing visual data, whether it be a view of a shop window or snapshot of a health and safety issue. Surely adding additional metadata to these images, such as current location, would be highly beneficial? 

Geotagging is now readily available to many end-users via functionality offered on modern mobile phones, such as the new Blackberry Curve 8900. Accordingly, I wanted to explore how easy it would be for a typical business end-user to add location data to captured images using the native geotagging functionality within the Blackberry Curve camera app.

Why Geotagging?

Geotagging allows mobile devices with a GPS receiver (like the 8900) to "tag" captured images with the location at which the image was taken, for example lat/lng coordinates and elevation. The lat/lng coordinates (along with other location data) is stored in the image EXIF metadata, and can be read by compatible applications, such as Flickr, allowing you to associate the images captured with a map location.

How?

On the 8900 enabling geotagging is very easy - when in camera mode simply press the menu key -> options ->Geotagging and make sure "enabled" is selected. You will notice that in the bottom right of the image preview screen a crosshair and "x" is now displayed in red. The red colour means that the device is attempting to get the current location data via GPS. As soon as the crossshairs turn white you're good to go, and any images captured while the crosshairs are white will be geotagged with the current location.

Now this sounds great, but in real use I have found that getting a GPS lock can be problematic... With my 8900 if I am in a building there is no chance of getting a lock (no surprises here), but even if I am standing in the middle of an open space it can take several minutes. On several occaisons the only way I could get a lock was to quit the camera viewer, start the Blackberry Maps app, acquire my location via GPS and then start the camera viewer again. The act of starting the GPS and finding the current location via the maps app seemed to bump-start the camera GPS for some reason?

I'm assuming that the GPS problems with the native camera app must be the result of a bug in the code, as the 8900 GPS works fine in other apps, including J2ME apps that I have developed myself.

When you do manage to get a GPS lock you can simply snap away. You can then upload your images to your PC and examine the EXIF metadata to view the location data. I've included a screenshot below which shows the image I captured, the EXIF GPS data (viewed using Paint Shop Pro) and the corresponding location on Google Maps... (I've obscured the GPS location slightly in order to hide my exact location - I don't want anyone stealing my cabbages... :) )

geotagging images on 8900

The Google "A" Pin is the location coordinates recorded in the EXIF information and the red arrow indicates the exact location - as you can see the location recorded in the image EXIF data is not exact, but within 200 meters of the original location. This shows the level of accuracy is not really what you would expect from a modern GPS, but I suspect that it is either that the coordinate data recorded in the EXIF data is truncated, or it could be due to the fact that I had to convert the lat/lng recorded in the EXIF from imperial to decimal (using this website)?

Something cool...

Another blog author posted on geotagging on his Blackberry, and after reading this I discovered that you can view the image and location on the Blackberry Maps app, just like you can with Google Maps - quite cool... Here is a screenshot of my device showing the location the image was taken... (apologies again for the info-hiding black lines)

BB Maps and Images

This may be slightly gimmicky, but it's quite neat... (Following on from my above point regarding accuracy, this screenshot shows that the Blackberry itself recorded the location very accurately, and so I'm strongly suspecting that the lat/lng data is truncated in the EXIF data...)

In Conclusion...

Geotagging is a very cool, and potentially very useful, feature. However, the current implementation on the 8900 is definitely not ready for primetime use yet, and I believe the inadequate GPS locking functionality would prohibit the use of the Blackberry camera app for capturing geo data in a real-world context. The fact that it takes several minutes to acquire a GPS lock, or you have to force the device to manually get a lock via the Maps app, ultimately results in disappointment, and how many business end-users would be prepared to wait-around before they can start capturing images?

Another point, slightly off-topic, is that Blackberry doesn't really provide any applications to help you manage your geotagged photos once you have uploaded them to your PC. Sure, you can view the images on a map on you device or upload the images to Flickr, but what about viewing/searching/sorting on the desktop?

If you want to add geotag or add location data to your captured images for business purposes, and also have the ability to manage them via a desktop/web app, then I would suggest that you look to more reliable third-party apps and services, such as those offered by Triopsis Ltd. This is a completely self-serving plug as I have built a large part of Triopsis' current applications, but it does mean that I can vouch for the quality :)

Daniel

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Daniel Bryant (Director) | Tai-Dev Ltd www.tai-dev.co.uk - IT Consultancy Services Specialising in JEE, Web 2.0 and RDBMS