flickr + N95: Automatically geotagged photos

Since I’m quite a bit of a geek and pretty much crazy about all the tech-stuff that’s possible and online and whatnot a major reason to decide for the N95 was the option of automatically geotag photos with the internal GPS. Now while I thought “it’s a phone with a camera and a gps-module – shouldn’t be a big deal” I was a little off with that one. Actually there’s a couple problems to resolve on the way to achieve that handy feature.

First of all Nokia didn’t think it’d be necessary to geotag photos automatically. First I was upset bout that, but thinking about it reveals the issue about the GPS-module eating valuable battery-lifetime if enabled by default. And I guess many people aren’t even interested in geotagging their photos at all. Lucky enough Nokia is clever and so there’s a tool out there called “Nokia Location Tagger“, doing exactly what you’d think: When running in the background it automatically geotags your photos, either with the position at the moment of taking it or with any valid position data the phone received within a user-definable timerange. Pretty neat, huh?

That alone doesn’t quite do the trick though, I’m geeky and a flickr-user so I want to be able to directly post my photos to flickr, geodata included. Funny enough there’s another Nokia application available (in fact it’s pre-installed, however there’s a newer version 3.0 out already): “Nokia Share Online“. With this tool it’s just a couple clicks to set up direct posting to your flickr-photostream and with the great connection capabilities of the N95 it’s an ease to get online, either with a data plan or with the next open WLAN around.

Just one more little thing to do. The photos will be uploaded to flickr, the GPS-location stored in the EXIF-data. But still if you view the picture it will say “place on map” instead of “view on map” – the location data hasn’t been imported to flickr. Why? Because you’ll have to activate this feature manually. The option can be found at Account > Privacy & Permissions > Defaults for new uploads, or here, and, tada, magic done! Now there’s only some minor updates to be done: Default tags for flickr-uploads via Share Online would be great, as well as a mixture of a text (e.g. “On the go”) and date for the photo titles.