CrowdSpirit

GPS DigiCam with intelligent tagging software

posted by ertman on 30 August 2007 2:31 Go to the market place Go to forum

Problem context :

With digital photography becoming so popular, it is increasingly difficult to organize, search, and present our personal photos. Anyone who has taken a long vacation and then struggled to remember where each photo was taken when they get home can benefit from this product.

Proposed Solution :

The first step is the hardware - a digital camera with a built in GPS reciever. As each photo is taken the GPS information is added to the EXIF headers automatically. With the addition of a digital compass, heading information can be added as well. Amazingly, there are only a few Camera/GPS combos on the market, and they are high-end, low-res units designed for survey work.

As GPS recievers are quite the power hogs, it might be a good idea to have a seperate battery for the GPS and the camera. If the GPS battery runs flat, you can still take untagged photos.

The second step is the software. Once the photos have been uploaded to your computer, the software should allow you to:

• Display the photos on a map
  • Show all pictures from San Francisco
  • Where did I take these 5 pictures?
• Search the photos based on location
  • Place name
  • Coordinated
  • Search radius
  • Favorite spot
  • Near other pictures
• Auto-tag the photos based on location and online sources
  • For example, with the GPS coordinates, you should be able to find the nearest hotel, amusement park, museum, resturaunt, school, etc. If several options are available, allow the user to overide the auto-picked location from a short list of other possibilities.
• And of course, upload to your favorite photo sharing site easily

Any location that the user manually entered in the past would be remembered, and future photos could be auto-tagged with that location. For example, "Mike's Cottage" or "Favorite Campsite."

At the end of the day, all the user needs to do it point, shoot, and upload. With no further work, the user should be able to search their photos for "Six Flags" and find all of their photos from the Six Flags theme parks. With no further work, they should be able to view all of their photos on a map.

 

Update:

 

Yes, there are a few GPS units with built in cameras, some high-end SLRs have data inputs for external GPS units, and some very high end and expensive phones have GPS and 5MP+ cameras. The idea here is a point-and-shoot type of digicam that has GPS tagging built in.

As for the software, there is nothing out there that has these features. GoogleEarth, Picassa, etc. are not even close to having this level of functionality (yet - maybe they will in a few years?)