by Marc Phillippe Babineau

Created on: November 21, 2009

Geo-tagging is the act of giving a picture a geographical tag-line, or electronic name, for storage use. You Geo-tag a picture so that in the future, you can pull up pictures that were taken only at, or within a predetermined distance of, that location. This is a great feature if you are making a scrapbook of your recent vacation, video montages of your trips, or if you are looking for a particular picture, and only know where it was taken, not when or by whom. You can also have all of the photos that were taken at any geographical location shown, for you to choose which one(s) you want to work with.

Picasa has added Geo-tagging to it's wealth of video transformation, tagging, fixing and

storing options. With the already extremely popular facial recognition software that is built into Picasa, finding pictures in your database has never been easier, and it also works on-line, so that you can find pictures that are available for free downloads by location, or with certain people in them.

Tips for Geo-Tagging photos in Picasa would include;

1) Install Google Earth and Picasa's most recent versions. Picasa's Geo-tagging only works with Google Earth for tagging geographical areas automatically. Google adds the latitude and longitudes of the pictures for you, and that data is taken directly from Google Earth.

2) Open Picasa.

3) Open a photo for editing.

4) Click on the "Geotag" button. This tells Picasa that you are going to be finding a location to associate with the photo presently in edit mode.

5) Using the Zoom feature, zoom in, using the Google Earth map, to as close as you can to where your picture was taken, so that the entire area that you are representing with your tag is presented, and not much else. City level is great for pictures taken in a city while on vacation, or a lower zoom setting for tropical islands.

6) Click on the "Geotag" button again. This will make Picasa electronically mark the latitudinal and longitudinal geographical location from Google Earth's map onto the photo. The location is then saved to the GPS exchangeable image file format, or .EXIF, which is a standard format used for storing information in photos, and now widely used by digital cameras and camcorders.

7) Keep it simple. Keep the tags that you give your photos simple, so that you would be able to find them without having to go through all of your tags first. All of your photos should be tagged if you are going to use Picasa's geo-tagging feature. Tag your photos with both the city and neighborhood, or the country and area that the photos were taken in, by geo-tagging the photo at two different zoom levels.

8) Save your photos on removable discs. Saving your tagged photos on a disc will save you a lot of trouble and extra work if you encounter a system crash, or other devastating memory problem.

9) Keep up to date. Make sure that you keep checking in on Picasa at www.picasa.com, to make sure that you have the most up to date version of their software. Download all pictures to one DVD or CD, and then download all of your albums to different discs. This gives you a more complete storage filing system for easier photo finding.

And, last but not least, practice, practice, practice. The more you use Picasa, for geo-tagging, facial recognition, or any of their other innovative features, the easier it will become to use, and the more enjoyable your experience will be.

Click! Download. Tag. Store. Share. It's that easy!

Learn more about this author, Marc Phillippe Babineau.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.