My photo hosting provider, smugmug.com, has added a new mash-up with Google Earth. I can set lattitude and longitude points for every photo I’ve taken, and they show up on a map on my photo site.
Now, the way it’s supposed to work is that you get a GPS card for your digital camera, and the geographic information is stored in the photo’s EXIF data, along with exposure and camera data. Not many cameras include GPS functionality, though, so you may have to use your camera’s only memory card slot for the GPS card, which limits your options.
Of course, I still use film, so I have to find the spot where I took the picture using Google Earth, which is a bit of a pain. Smugmug.com hasn’t quite figured out how to make data entry easy, either, so I have to update one picture at a time, even though I may have many pictures taken at the same location.
Also, Google Earth doesn’t have detailed photos of every place on earth–it’s mainly just North American and European cities, so I couldn’t create the photo maps of Guanajuato, Costa Rica and the West Bank that I’ve been thinking about, let alone pinpoint National Park locations in the US.
Lastly, smugmug.com hasn’t quite figured out how to deal with domain mapping when combined with Google Earth. You have to register your domain with Google for the mapping features to work. I registered photos.spymyshadow.com, but my site can also be accessed via mao.smugmug.com. Now, If you drill down into the map on photos.spymyshadow.com to see the pictures, you switch domains to maps.smugmug.com. When you click on a picture to get back to my photosite, it returns you to mao.smugmug.com. Since I can only register one site with Google (and that’s the spymyshadow site) the map breaks at mao.smugmug.com.
Still, pretty cool feature.