I’ve long held the belief that location based services on the mobile platform will be very slow in terms of adoption.
- facial recognition that will allow you to find and categorize your pictures based on the faces of who is in them,
- publish your photos directly to Facebook and Flickr,
- new slideshow features,
- location awareness in a new feature called Places!
This last feature is of special interest to me. You see, Nokia NSeries phones have GPS chips on board. Therefore, photos taken on most NSeries can be geo-encoded, if you set the preferences up to do so.
This means each photo I take on my N82, N96, or other handset have the GPS coordinates for me to utilize. If I want, I can see all the photos I took while I was in Barcelona as an example.
With iPhoto ’09, the software will now be able to read the GPS coordinates on the photos and show me a global map overlayed with my photos. So Cool!
Flickr does this now in a limited fashion. That is, when I upload a photo into Flickr, I can place it on a map, allowing you to see your photos overlaid onto a map.
However, Flickr doesn’t seem to parse the existing GPS data as a part of each JPG that comes off my Nokia NSeries phones. This is weird!
Even more weird is the fact that Flickr sees the GPS coordinates in the EXIF information, but doesn’t auto-magically place that photo on the map without me manually doing it.
In Conclusion:
iPhoto ’09 in tandem with my Nokia NSeries handsets will make for a very functional way of interacting with and categorizing my photo collection. I am happy Apple has supported location awareness into iPhoto’s feature set!