GPS

Late last year, I bought myself a little gift, a Toshiba Thrive. Among the features of this device is GPS. I have downloaded an app to record tracks, and I have been using these tracks to determine where I take the pictures that I upload.

I still have problems. For starters, old pictures do not have GPS tracks for me to use. I have still been geotagging them, but I’m sure that I have missed locations by fairly significant distances. For example, pictures at Mount Rainier National Park are primarily posted at coordinates for the park itself.

Another little quirk is that I don’t always have my GPS going. This can either be due to me not bothering with a GPS track (quick shot, do not want to provide coordinates to my home, not expecting much accuracy, etc.) or the GPS cutting out (which actually seems more common under clouds than under a roof). If I have a decent guess on recent pictures, I might still geotag. Otherwise, I might not bother.

The general guideline is that anything taken with a DSLR January 8, 2012 or later that has been geotagged will either be accurate or I feel like I can guess close enough. Some pictures with a point-and-shoot will be accurate (especially if I had another picture with a similar time taken with a DSLR) while others will miss by quite a bit. Pictures before January 8, 2012 will range from somewhat inaccurate to wildly inaccurate.