iPhone 2.0 stores GPS location data in photos
Image via Wikipedia
I made a small discovery in the new iPhone 2.0 firmware. When you take a photo, the iPhone stores the latitude and longitude (your location on the planet) in the photo itself. Geotagging.
JPEG files have meta-data information, the so called EXIF data. These may contain items such as the exposure, the date and the filesize. But you can basically put anything in there. Apple now puts the location data in. This opens up all sorts of location based services. For example, when you upload to MobileMe or Flickr, you may soon see where the picture was taken on a Google map.
Because the pictures I took were taken with an ‘old’ 2G iPhone, it’s not the real GPS data which gets stored. It’s the location, as estimated by my proximity to a cell tower or a WiFi base station. Apple uses Skyhookwireless to retrieve those data.
BTW. My phone is running beta7 of the iPhone 2.0 firmware (available for registered developers only), in beta6, this feature was not yet available, so it has been recently added.
On the screenshot below, you see the GPS information. The free tool I used is EXIF Reader.
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Tags: Apple, geotag, geotagging, Global Positioning System, Google Maps, GPS, Handhelds, iPhone, iPhone 3G, Smartphones
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June 18, 2008 at 5:52 pm
[…] iPhone 2.0 stores GPS location data in photos [via Zemanta] […]
December 7, 2008 at 3:12 am
[…] more and more physical cameras are starting to implement this technology. And, even though the iPhone stores the GPS position of where you took your photo, there is no true utilization of it within the supplied photo application. For me the only […]