As Google have just released Google Earth for the iPod touch I’ve been having a play with that.  One of the most interesting features is the links to geo-tagged photos.  These are simply photos which are linked to the location at which they were taken.

The service used by Google is Panoramio.  This is similar to a lot of other photo sharing sites, except that it’s based around location.  When I was searching around in Google I found that there were a few sites for which I had photos which were currently untagged, so I’ve spent the last couple of nights uploading and annotating some of my photos.

If you want to get your photos onto Google Earth then there are a set of rules you need to follow.  The photos are only supposed to be of the scenery, not the people you were with at the time.  They’re mostly interested in outdoor photos and they don’t want anything too detailed.  I actually found that very few of my photos fulfilled these criteria (most have people in them), but I still found several which were worth uploading.

Some cameras now include a GPS unit so that they automatically tag photos with their location as well as the date.  I can see this becoming increasingly popular in future as it will make it a lot easier to go back through your old photos in the future and figure out what was going on.  In my case though I had to go through each photo and manually annotated the position using Google Maps.  For well populated areas this is fairly easy, but trying to accurately map photos taken when walking in the Lake Distict was an interesting challenge.

I’ve now got my small collection all up and running and will try to update it whenever I get the chance.  Apparently it takes up to a couple of months for the images to make their way onto Google Earth, but I shall be keeping my eye out for them.