Find out geotags of photos. Geolocation on Android - how to enable the function in Google or Yandex, install special programs. Modern uses of GPS
Not all users know that digital photographs can be marked with shooting coordinates - geographic latitude and longitude. This data is recorded in the so-called EXIF - a special extension of a digital image, where a lot of information is entered: date and time of shooting, camera model, exposure, ISO, and so on and so forth. If the camera (phone) is equipped with a GPS chip, then GPS coordinates can also be entered into this EXIF - this is called a “geotag”. > This feature can be very convenient, especially if we're talking about about photographing all kinds of travel: instead of answering questions from the series “Where is this? Where is this? Where is this beautiful place?”, you simply say that there are coordinates in each photo - take it and see who needs it . Many viewing programs can display coordinate values in photos - for example, ACDSee Photo Manager, in which you can enable viewing of all EXIF data.
GPS coordinates in ACDSee
However, just coordinates as such say little. It would be much more convenient to be able to see the shooting location if necessary - for example, in the same Google maps. It would be quite obvious. Well, no problem! Can do things like this free program Picasa from Google. Install it and launch it.
The program will scan the images on your computer and display them as thumbnails. On those photos that have a geotag, Picasa will show a special red icon - like a position mark on Google maps.
Geotagged photos
If you click on the same icon from the bottom toolbar, Picasa will display a map panel, where it will show the coordinates of all the photos in the folder or the coordinates of the selected photo.
Photo and map
Moreover, on the map you can also select the “satellite” mode and other modes supported by Google maps.
Using this program, you can also manually add geotags to already taken photographs - select the desired area on the map, and then add the corresponding geotag to the selected images. There are quite a few cameras with built-in GPS, but if you don’t have one, it hardly makes sense to buy something like that just because of geotags. Considering the growing popularity of smartphones with cameras, which can already produce quite decent images in quality, the task of geotagging is solved simply - as a rule, if a smartphone is equipped with a GPS module, then its camera can add these geotags. Here, for example, are the iPhone settings - enabling geotagging in the camera.
Enabling geotagging in camera
Here's how to enable a geotag on an Android smartphone.
Turning on GPS on Android
Well, at the same time, it makes sense to immediately check whether the geotag is enabled in your smartphone settings, otherwise the opposite situation may happen: you are absolutely not interested in the fact that from your photographs posted on the Internet, it is possible to determine the exact coordinates of the shooting, but they are You are vilely registered with your smartphone on every frame.
One of the advantages of Instagram is its huge reach of an audience all over the world. When you post a video or photo on your brand account, it can potentially be seen by people from different cities around the world. But only those impressions that are geographically relevant to your brand will be effective, and that’s when Instagram geotags come into play.
Whether you're a local business trying to reach nearby customers or a global brand looking to target audiences in specific regions, geotagging works. In this article, we're going to cover everything you need to know about Instagram geotags and show you how to use them to interact with your target audience.
Instagram geotag - what is it?
Instagram allows you to track a specific location, down to latitude and longitude. Geolocation is collected from the physical location of your mobile device, allowing users to tag posts at those coordinates. Keep in mind, this only works if you tell Instagram to share your location.
Features of Instagram Geotag
There are several features of Instagram geotags that we should consider before using them to interact with our target audience:
Ways to attract users through Instagram geotag
Now that you have a better understanding of how the Instagram geotag works, the question is how can you use it to further engage your audience?
People are constantly searching for businesses, places, and trends on Instagram. In fact, nearly a quarter of social media influencers say Instagram is best network to implement influence strategies. This is due to the visual nature of the network, but also due to its ease of use. Instagram makes interaction easier and, most importantly, opens up new content. For users to see your brand's posts, they must appear in the feed. Here are some ways to use Instagram geotag to reach your target audience.
Find your clients
First of all, find what your customers are saying about you on Instagram. You can do quick search to find out when and where customers mention your brand.
search engine search example
To get started, search for your brand name, branded hashtags, physical stores, and anything closely related to your brand on Instagram.
This will give you an idea of how big your presence is in social network. You can also use Sprout Social's Smart Inbox services, where you can track mentions of your brand, hashtags and messages posted in your business's geolocation.
Search for local opinion leaders
Let's say you are opening a new clothing store and you want to talk about the upcoming opening. To do this, you can find local opinion leaders using an Instagram geotag. To do this, open Instagram and go to the search tab. Make sure the Places tab is selected. Then enter your location.
The search results will display the latest posts posted in that specific location. The latest posts with the most engagement will appear in the Top Posts section.
From here, you can simply look through all the posts and find which users will match your brand. Then write to them with a proposal to work together. Remember that an opinion leader does not always mean a celebrity. If a person has several thousand readers, then it is worth reaching out to them to let them know about your event. You can also increase efficiency by offering some kind of exclusive discount for them and for anyone they bring with them.
Social networks, accessible through phones around the world, leave a definite imprint on people's lives. They want to share not only photos, videos and thoughts, but also where they are. By marking places on the map, you can later return there in your memories. This is why geo-tagging is needed.
What it is?
The progenitor of this phenomenon, perhaps, can be considered the inscriptions on the back of photographs, which everyone probably came across while looking through old ones. Now, when memorable frames most often do not have a physical medium, but are viewed only on the screen of a digital device, the so-called geopositioning or geo-tagging. What it is?
Gigabytes of media content generated daily by Internet users contain a lot of information. Among other things, it is now possible to embed information about the current location of a person posting a photo, video, or just an article online. You just need to select the appropriate item, for example “Specify location”, after which the device will determine its coordinates and offer them as a reference. So geo-tagging on your phone or computer is just a couple of extra clicks. But was there really a need for this?
Development history
Not everyone knows that every modern photograph contains so-called metadata: date and time of shooting, camera model, mode, etc. Among other things, there are coordinates there, as well as geo-tagging. What is this from a technology point of view? Just another module that is now present almost everywhere.
This became possible thanks to the global positioning system - GPS. Initially, this technology, developed in the 1970s, was available only to the US military, but later it began to be used by everyone. The benefits of this system are difficult to overestimate, since it is also used by scientists in their research.
Modern uses of GPS
Thanks to the ubiquitous presence of receivers, the system is successfully used in many areas of life. Firstly, it is used by rescuers to send help to someone who dials their number without wasting time. Secondly, geologists and surveyors, like cartographers, can thus make their work easier. In addition, GPS is used to navigate almost any vehicle in the world. Finally, not long ago this technology was also adopted by marketers - with certain smartphone settings, if you find yourself in a certain area, you can receive a message, for example, about a restaurant or store located nearby. Fortunately, this is not a very popular solution yet.
And GPS and geo-tagging are a great help for a traveler. Instead of using a photo album and relying on imperfect human memory, you can upload photos into a special program that will place flags and frames on a world map. In addition, the most popular social networks even recognize this information automatically.
Prospects
The vast majority of location-tagged information is photographs. And it’s not surprising: people’s desire to see the world, the popularity of travel blogs - all this has made geo-tagging extremely popular. What does this mean? That, if desired, you can track the movements of each specific user. Of course, it is a personal matter for each person whether to disclose this kind of information about themselves or not, but they are already built into many devices, and not everyone is bothered with setting them up. So you can provide such information to everyone without even knowing it. Of course, geo-tagging is convenient, but it is worth remembering that every coin has two sides.
I’ll tell you one way to deal with goons who don’t reveal secret places where they fish or pick mushrooms. I’ll say right away that there’s nothing smart about this method, but it works. I’m even sure that many people know about this, so today’s story will be for those who have never thought about it.
It’s simple, every person has a desire to brag, this is a fact (I can already “hear” a friend’s shout behind me, they say, Chernyakov, they don’t judge others by themselves). Almost all fishermen and mushroom pickers love to photograph their trophies and post their photos on the Internet. So, ask such a person to send you the original photo. For what? Well, you can lie, they say, I liked the photo so much that I want to set it as a screensaver on my Windows desktop.
It's simple. Almost everyone today takes photographs in nature with their mobile phones. Almost every cell phone has GPS. Almost every mobile phone has the option to put coordinates in a photo, and by default no one disables it. And if there are coordinates, then they can be seen. How? - easier than steamed turnips. Now I’ll show you using this photo as an example.
Digital photos have this thing called EXIF. I won’t go into details now, I’ll just say that this is additional information about the photo recorded in the file of the photo itself. There is a lot of interesting information there, for example: when the photo was taken, with what camera, and what is most interesting for us is where it was taken. They register there geographical coordinates, and extremely accurate.
If the photo has already been downloaded to your computer, click on it right click mouse, then select “Properties” from the menu. In the window that opens, select the “Details” tab, and just below you will see the GPS coordinates. As I said, very accurate (and we will return to this picture again at the end of the article, remember it).
If you don't know what to do with these numbers, you can use, for example, Picasa program from Google. If the photo has coordinates, Picasa will show a red pin. Click on it and you will see a map.
As you understand, the Internet is already full of such services that show a map from a photograph. Just upload such a photo to the site or provide a link to it. I won’t even be lazy, I’ll explain how to “take a link to a photo.” For example, if you use Firefox, then everything is simple, right-click on the photo and click on “Copy Image Location”.
IN Internet Explorer a little more confused. Right-click on the photo, select “Properties”, in the window that opens, select the link with the mouse, right-click on the selected text and select “Copy”.
Here's the way. The main thing is to ask for a photograph.
And now information for new residents of Winnipeg who want to know exactly where mushrooms grow nearby. Over the weekend I was in a forest park. While riding a bicycle, I noticed an aspen boletus near the road. Since I was not going to pick mushrooms, I just photographed the mushroom and moved on, without cutting it.
Here it is, a real untouched boletus, and if you need it, find the place yourself. By the way, not far from the city.
Okay, as you understand, “redneck” is true, it’s all nonsense. This is not the purpose of this article. I just want you to understand how terrible it is when technology falls into the hands of amateurs. And what a horror it is when criminals abuse the ignorance of amateurs. This is both a way to find where to steal something, and a way to find a person who is not guaranteed to be happy to meet you.
As far as I understand, when a photo is uploaded to Facebook or Odnoklassniki or (forgive me, gentlemen) on VKontakte, the system itself erases the coordinates for you. I also couldn’t get the coordinates from Instagram, but I read where it says that there is even an application for mobile phone, which from an Instagram photo shows a photo with Google Maps Street View, and address. But what about it?
I don’t know, I can’t check it myself. What do other Internet resources do with photographs? – we also just have to guess. But you understand that it is better not to guess, but to trust in your own head.
Now the obvious conclusions. Yes, we know that mobile phones by default enter GPS coordinates into a photo. And it's wonderful, yes! Especially when you bring a bunch of photos from a long trip, and then you don’t remember where it all was. And then one day, they found it.
But this is great for personal use. If you want to take a photo from your phone and send it to someone, but don’t want them to see the coordinates, every smartphone has an option in the settings not to include GPS coordinates in the photo file. Turn it off and take pictures. If you need to, turn it back on. Business?
If the photo is on a computer, it’s even easier. Before sending a photo, make a copy of it, and then, as I said above, right-click on the photo, then select “Properties” from the menu. In the window that opens, select the “Details” tab, and at the very bottom click on “Remove Properties and Personal Information”.
By the way, on my website, when I publish photos, I almost never erase the coordinates. Firstly, nothing personal, and secondly, perhaps you yourself are interested in knowing where the places that I photographed are located. And once, yes, I was greedy, but this is the same “secret” clearing.
In general, let's summarize. If we already use technology, we use it consciously so as not to be a monkey with a grenade. And there are plenty of all sorts of tricky technologies. For example, as I noticed, a huge number of owners of Android phones do not even suspect the existence of such a useful (and dangerous) site https://maps.google.com/locationhistory/ And this is not the limit.
This F.A.Q. The article is intended to tell the reader how to enable display of the photo location on Android or help configure the display of geotagging information on any photo taken from an Android smartphone/tablet.
Enabling this option will help you add the geographic coordinates of the location where you took the photo that you want to upload to Vkontakte, Facebook, Instagram or another social network...
This is exactly what a photo uploaded to the network looks like, “linked” with geotagging and “uploaded” to VK.
In order to enable display of the place where the shooting took place, we will take a few simple steps to set up the system.
At the very beginning, you need to go to the “Camera” application on your mobile device and make sure that the function of adding shooting coordinates to photos is enabled:
Attention! If you begin to upload the photographs taken after this to the Internet, the shooting coordinates will become publicly available.
We are done with the camera settings. You can check the display of geotagging on photos. You need to view information about the image in the “Shooting location” section:
If desired result not achieved, then we do the following...
You need to check whether location access is activated on your Android mobile device. To do this, go to general “Settings”, then select yours. Then we look for the “Confidentiality” section and go there.
It is there that we will find the “Location Access” item; we need to activate it. By doing this, we will allow all applications to receive data about our location or current geographic coordinates.
We also need to choose one of three location modes:
- High accuracy. In this case operating system will use all available data from the GPS module, mobile and WLAN networks to obtain the most accurate coordinates. In this case, the battery charge will be consumed relatively quickly.
- Save battery power. Here the smartphone or tablet will receive location information based on the WLAN and mobile network(if available).
- Based on device sensors. The latter option involves analyzing positioning data only from the GPS module.
The second method is probably the most optimal. Although, it may not work on tablets that are not designed to work on mobile networks.