Some of you may have decided to fork out the $20 to upgrade your Google Earth to the Plus edition. The key feature of the Plus edition is the GPS support that it has…which may soon be even more useful.
Garett Rogers from Googling Google noticed that Google registered three new domains on Monday. What are they?
- googleimagetagger.com
- googleimagetagger.net
- googleimagetagger.org
From the domain name it looks like Google is coming out with an image tagger, duh? When he started searching the Web looking for an image tagger example he stumbled upon a free download that Earthmate offers for their GPS. The software will take your photos and map them according to your location at the time the picture was taken.
This means that we might see some of Google’s services finally start coming together. They could integrate Google Earth and Picasa together to form a nice tagging solution. However, in order for it to become popular they would probably have to offer GPS support in the free version of Google Earth.
I love and use Google Earth (Free) all the time. So this will be a good addition, if this is what they are doing.
I don’t know if this is the case with picasa 2 – but in the picasa beta I have you can geotag images and have them appear in google earth at the correct locations.
Few people pay for Google Earth, as there are better mapping solutions to pay for. Nevertheless, Google Earth is a wonderful tool and I’m interested in the idea of linking it with Picasa – it would be cool to click on an image and be able to see precisely where it was taken, assuming you’d tagged it correctly.
The other thing that I was thinking of is that you would always have to have a GPS on you in order for it to know your location. The only way I can see that being possible is if consumers are allowed access to the GPS in their cell phones. Right now many cell phone carriers only have GPS built-in for emergency purposes and now “for fun.”