Product Reviews

If you've never heard the term 'geotagging', you're far from alone, but give it a year, and it could the hottest buzzword in photography. It usually means embedding location data - often simply latitude and longitude, but sometimes altitude as well - in the invisible metadata of photos. Using this data, you can place your photos on a map, or easily search your albums for pictures taken at a particular locale.

The problem with this otherwise excellent concept is that very few pictures capture this data automatically when you press the shutter. Step forward Geophoto, which can both help geotag your pictures, and also gives you a refreshingly novel way to flick through your photo albums. Using location data either embedded in the pictures or entered yourself, your pictures are pinned to a globe which you can zoom in on.

Navigation is simple - an 'orient to north' button

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is very welcome - and when you've selected a group of photos, you can play a slideshow of them. It would have been nice to be able to somehow create slideshows that made more use of the geographical data - maybe flying from spot to spot as you show a holiday trip, then exporting a movie of this flyover - but it's still a fun way to explore your photos.

Photos can be added from iPhoto, 'photocasts', the Finder or Flickr feeds. When you subscribe to a Flickr feed, the system, by default, looks to grab geotagged photos, but you can add your own search terms.

You can also right-click on any point on the map and search for publicly available Flickr photos from that location. However, Flickr's 20 million-plus geotagged photos seem to be concentrated in urban areas, so armchair adventurers might be disappointed.

You can also use Geophoto to tag your own photos, but it's a bit of an imprecise science that involves dragging photos onto the map. You can manually tie photos to locations stored in Geophoto's database, but there are no street-level listings, although an imminent update is designed to solve this. Geotagging data can be written back to photos' metadata fields for sharing, though this doesn't apply to photos hosted remotely, such as on Flickr.

Geophoto is a sweet, fun application with bags of potential. It's only a tenner, and its appeal can only increase as the developers add features and the practice of geotagging gathers momentum.