On a recent trip (house hunting in AZ) I had occasion to take hundreds of pictures of homes.  I used my GPS to embed the geo-tag information into the images as mentioned in this blog (Photo Management – Geo Tags update).  This real-world example of using the GPS and geo-tagged images shows how useful the information can be to help with your post-trip analysis of the data.

Several benefits of the geo-data included:

• Documenting time and date according to the GPS time when I forgot to change my camera’s internal time.


• When looking at a large volume of images it was often difficult to tell when one set ended and another started.  The geo-tag information clearly shows when sets changed.


• The ability to find and sort by city was useful and powerful as implemented in iPhoto


• The ability to look at the images in a map view was nice as I reviewed home purchase options and evaluated commuting distances to work.

After using the GPS as attached to my camera I feel it’s become an essential tool in my camera bag.  I really liked having the Geo-tag information and want to make sure all future images contain it.

Concerning battery life, in a previous post I was asked how much the drain on the battery changed my camera usage.  The reality is that I use to take as many as 1000+ images on a single battery (1500 in some cases).  With the GPS shooting over the course of the day and turning off the camera when driving to new locations, I was able to get 500+ images per battery charge.  I keep several batteries just in case but the roughly 50% reduction wasn’t enough to change my desire to continue to use the GPS.