Alamy and Geotagging?

[Michael Halberstadt]

I've started to geotag my photos. In my case I don't have a fancy new camera with GPS, but you can use your phone's GPS too. Anybody else doing this? Seems like Alamy offering location that isn't manually entered could be beneficial for photo buyers. Say if a photo buyer was looking for photos of specific neighborhood, building, landmark etc., they could just go to a map and explore photos. Even if the photographer didn't know to keyword with what the buyer was looking for. This is possible on Flickr for example and I use Flickr maps to explore and research an area before visiting. I also find it helps keywording a lot.

[DHill]

I geotag but mainly to ensure that I can provide accurate caption and location information. I manually put location information into key words and Alamy's location field, so that buyers have easy access to the full information there. I've no idea whether the GPS information stays in metadata for the buyer to access; unless Alamy can tell us, I guess we'd have to check with a buyer to find out. 

 

I did have a GPS unit, but that broke so now I use my phone to produce a GPS track (using the MyTracks app on an Android phone) which I then attach to the photos in Lightroom. It's slightly more hassle than a GPS unit - you have to watch out for images taken when the phone didn't get a good GPS lock. Lightroom will try to interpolate location based on the time stamp of the image, and often gets it wrong. So it's important to check this. 

[Michael Halberstadt]

We're doing something very similar. I'm running Backitude on my phone and then downloading my history from Google Latitude and applying results in LR. I really wanted the new Canon 6d, but have held off until I'm less broke (a while.)

 

I think for some buyers having photos mapped would be super useful. Geotagging seems to be helpful to you and me for keywording but I'm sure we're missing lots. Say if you visited my part of the world, the San Francisco area. While you go around town photographing and later using your GPS data to keyword, you'd likely omit the neighborhood name unless it's one of the long established North Beach, Chinatown etc. But if you happened through Dogpatch, Delores Heights, China Basin, Potrero Hill etc you might not even have known it. Now imagine a photo buyer (Sunset, Via Magazine etc.) is researching a story on one of those lesser known neighborhoods. Presently they'd have to 1)search through the limited amount of images where the photographer knew the up and coming neighborhood he was in or 2) sort through zillions of useless San Francisco photos. 

 

The same principal would work for lesser known landmarks. You'd be forgiven if you didn't know you had made a fantastic photo of a building by the architects Timothy Pflueger, Weeks and Day, or the unmarked home to Internet Archive etc etc. Unless you were really thorough in your keyword research you'd likely miss such details and it would be relatively easy for a photo researcher to find what they were looking for sans keywords. 

 

At least that's how I imagine this working.

I geotag but mainly to ensure that I can provide accurate caption and location information. I manually put location information into key words and Alamy's location field, so that buyers have easy access to the full information there. I've no idea whether the GPS information stays in metadata for the buyer to access; unless Alamy can tell us, I guess we'd have to check with a buyer to find out. 

 

I did have a GPS unit, but that broke so now I use my phone to produce a GPS track (using the MyTracks app on an Android phone) which I then attach to the photos in Lightroom. It's slightly more hassle than a GPS unit - you have to watch out for images taken when the phone didn't get a good GPS lock. Lightroom will try to interpolate location based on the time stamp of the image, and often gets it wrong. So it's important to check this. 

[Alamy]

Thanks - we're aware this is something we can make use of and we are certainly considering implementing this in the future. 

[Reciprocity Images]

Thanks - we're aware this is something we can make use of and we are certainly considering implementing this in the future. 

 

Along a similar thread: I always embed location data into ITPC fields, but Alamy does not seem to import this into "Location" field in Manage Images... Would save a lot of time going back and adding this a second time to every image. Other agencies seems to digest location data just fine.

 

-Jason