When I save this location to the image file, Picasa uses the online Google Maps service to find out the GPS coordinates of the location and writes them into the image file as Exif metadata. Here’s a screenshot of a photo being displayed in Picasa, and I’ve used Picasa to assign a set of GPS coordinates to the image file, by moving the red location pin to the correct location on the map: It does this by sending the GPS values to an online Bing service, which then returns the location as text strings. If a file contains GPS coordinates in the Exif metadata when it’s brought in to WLPG, then reverse geocoding will be triggered automatically and WLPG will assign a location address to the file based on the GPS values. a street address, and when you add “geotags” to an image, it will store the information as XMP metadata in the image file. This metadata is not coordinate data, but textual data, e.g. However, and somewhat confusingly, you’ll see that WLPG has provision for what it calls “geotags” to add geographic metadata into an image file. That’s because WLPG does not do geotagging: you can’t use it to add coordinate data into an image file’s metadata. WLPG, so far, does not have a mapping interface for handling geographic data. When you place a pin on the map displayed in Picasa and associate it with a particular photo, Picasa will write the GPS coordinates of the location’s Latitude and Longitude into the image file’s Exif metadata. Picasa has gone down the geotagging route, hence the use of the map interface. ![]() a street address) to derive the coordinate data for that location. Latitude and Longitude) to an image file’s metadata, while geocoding is the process of using other forms of geographic data (e.g. ![]() In short, geotagging is the process of adding coordinate data (i.e. ![]() There are two main approaches to handling geographic data: Geotagging and Geocoding. Picasa and WLPG handle geographic metadata in completely different ways, and it’s as well to be aware of the distinction. Now, Google have just released version 3.9 of Picasa, so I took a look at it to see what has changed. That Makernotes corruption bug was acknowledged by Microsoft a year ago, but it is still there in the latest build of WLPG. And once Microsoft had corrected a horrendous geotagging bug in WLPG, I was still left with the fact that WLPG will merrily corrupt Makernotes in Exif metadata if you use it to edit metadata or tag people’s faces. Picasa version 3.8 would not display my geotags correctly, as you can see from the examples I show in this blog post. These are fairly evenly matched in features, but they both suffer from issues such that I do not make much use of them. Up until a couple of days ago, the latest versions meant version 3.8 of Picasa and build. As each new version of Picasa or WLPG has been released, I’ve taken a look at them and blogged about my findings. I first blogged about Picasa back in 2005, when I compared it (favourably) with Microsoft’s Digital Image Library, a product that was subsequently discontinued by Microsoft, and replaced by Windows Live Photo Gallery, which was released in 2007. ![]() They have both been around for some years, and have each gone through a number of iterations, adding features each time. Google’s Picasa and Microsoft’s Windows Live Photo Gallery are free tools for organising, editing and sharing (via the web) collections of photos on your PC.
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