Location Acquisition
Geotagging is gaining popularity with photographers to produce geotagged photographs. A few cameras have built-in geolocation capability. Most, apart from smartphones, do not, so many photographers rely on external GPS receivers to determine location. Location may be inserted immediately into the picture file by tethering with Bluetooth or suitable wired connection, which are about as rare in cameras as the built-in autogeotagging feature.
GPS units, internal or external, require a lock from at least three satellites (for position), which usually requires up to 60 seconds. However, acquisition time is decreasing rapidly with hardware improvements. Some 21st-century GPS receivers use cell tower location and one global positioning satellite to obtain a faster lock on location. This technology known as assisted GPS (aGPS) is becoming more popular in cellular phones, since it leverages cell tower locations.
One alternative to GPS is WiFi triangulation which uses the MAC addresses of nearby wireless access points to determine position. Automatic geotagging relies on media acquisition devices that contain GPS, aGPS, or WiFi or other local positioning systems. Many camera phones are also equipped to use the methods of mobile phone tracking.
Locations may be added later using a user's computer or a geotagging photo sharing web site. It has even been proposed that in future, it may be possible to deduce the locations of photos purely by comparison with large numbers of geotagged photos. These geotagging techniques rely on post-processing of media, recorded tracks and/or MAC addresses, and cannot be used for real-time geotagging.
With the rapid rise of mobile smartphones which integrate GPS receivers and cameras, and relative market stagnation of separate devices, these phones are the most numerous instruments for autogeotagging. Those that don't include this ability in their stock software may acquire it by installing appropriate mobile apps.
Read more about this topic: Real-time Geotagging
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