Geotagging craze! ...... A Mac user 1.5 symptom?

Ok, I have to admit that I am hooked by the geo-tagging possibilities of EXIF. With the inclusion of geographical capabilities in iPhoto, I have gone into somewhat of a Geotagging craze. I have been looking at GPS loggers, and I also started using this handy program HoudahGeo which can do Geotaging of iPhoto images from a GPS logger file or, as is my case right now, Google Earth. And, it seems I am not the onl one geotagging like crazy right now.. There are now compact cameras, DSLR cameras (like Nikon D90 or similar products) and mobile phones with a GPS chip in it, storing the location of the camera in the image EXIF file. Amazing data!

Ok, but does this really a Mac user 2.0 phenomenon? From my perspective, I would say that it is. I see soooo many possibilities when it comes to extracting all these wonderful data and organizing my photo album (regardless of software package used) using the EXIF data. I used to have a Perl script that would rename all my images by date and time when they were taken, so that it would be very unlikelly that I would later overwrite the image with another image with a different contents. Of course, you would potentially have a problem when importing a friends pictures, if you were out taking pictures together. If you are both on the same spot, you probably see something nice to take pictures of at the same time. When snapping away at this gorgeous statue from different angles, it is very likelly that eventually you would both take a picture in the same second. So, now you will overwrite your picture with your friend's picture when importing it to your database. Not something that I think most peope would like. But, this is easilly solvable by adding GPS coodrdinates to the file name. The likellyhood that you would be standing on the same spot when taking the pictures is not very likelly. Also, it makes finding files on the hard drive taken at around a certain place not very difficult. I like databases a lot, but transparent file naming always helps! :-)

I guess the Mac user 1.0 enjoys the possibilities of geo-tagging too. But, I guess that they are not seeing the possibilities beyond what the things Apple already thought of. I like what I see in iPhoto too, and I will probably get iLife just because of this great update to iPhoto, but for me it goes slightly beyond that. I see that possibly I will not always want to be confined to what iPhoto or the great people in the Apple developer team can think of, but rather have the ability of using the data outside of their applications too. I like the fancy stuff, but it is no enough! :-)

So, I guess this is a Mac user 1.5 phenomenon - satisfying almost all of the things a the 2.0 user whants, but more than what the 1.0 user sees as something useful.

A bit like Applescript, I guess. :-)