geocoding
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Nokia has its wicked way with Bing Maps, stork delivers traffic advice and geocoding
We already knew that Nokia had been running its fingers through Bing's map-like hair, marking it with its scent, now it's added a little lipstick to its collar. The latest addition to the Microsoft-mapping service now uses Nokia's live traffic and geocoding algorithms. This brings the functionality of Nokia's "Where" platform over to 24 nations (including the US, UK and Canada) of Bing users. Best of all for American maps that info also covers side streets. Good to see the Nokia / Microsoft collaboration yielding ever more fruits, let's just hope they're considering the bigger picture, too.
RapidoMap: slick geocoding for free
We've previously covered quite a few different applications to geocode your photos. Geocoding or geotagging is the process of adding location information (latitude and longitude) to the EXIF metadata of your photos, so you can see where they were taken. RapidoMap is one of the newest of these tools and looks to have a couple of particularly nice features. The application integrates a browser for Yahoo Maps which is how you actually locate your photos on the globe. It has an iLife media browser that makes it easy to get your photos in, and a built-in Flickr uploader.Best of all, RapidoMap is a free download from app4mac (points off to them, however, for using an installer package).[via Macworld]
HoudahGeo geocoding with Google Earth integration
We have posted about several differing geocoding solutions for the Mac. All of these programs allow you to embed location information in the EXIF data of your photographs, thus specifying where the photo was taken as well as the time, date, etc. The newest entry into the Mac geocoding sweepstakes is HoudaGeo, which has just been released as a public beta. Like some of the others, it allows you to tag your photos either by importing tracking data from a GPS device (syncing using the time stamps) or by using an interface with Google Maps. Once the photos have been tagged you can export them to Google Earth with a single click:HoudaGeo is a free download while it's in beta but will eventually be shareware.
Geophoto: Geocoding Refined
We've previously mentioned a couple of ways to do Mac-based geocoding-that is, applying location information to the EXIF meta data of your photos. Now comes the latest entry in the geocoding sweepstakes: Geophoto from Ovolab. Geophoto presents you with a Google Earth like interface that you can zoom in/out and drop your photos on the appropriate spot from the Finder, iPhoto, Aperture, etc.. In addition, you can subscribe to iPhoto Photocasts or Flickr geocoded photosets. Unfortunately, although you can search for particular locations by name, political boundaries (countries, cities, etc.) do not appear on the map, nor does the zoom go down to the street level, so putting a photo in exactly the right spot is difficult. (Ovolab says they are working on adding street-level detail in the future.)This is a very slick application, but that slickness comes at a rather steep price: $49.95. A demo (limited to 50 photos) is available for download. I think there is a lot of promise here, but this is a version 1.0 application and it shows.[Via MacMinute]
