If you still think that Picasa dominates the photo management scene, you have yet to give the latest version of Windows Live Photo Gallery a spin. Among a plethora of new features that have made their way into this amazing application is one of my favorites, the ability to geotag images. Geotagging allows you to assign a GPS coordinate to an image, which makes browsing images a whole lot of fun. Imagine that instead of opening an album by date or trip you can pull up a map of all your pictures and browse them by location, wouldn’t that be cool? Although you will not be able to view the pictures on a map yet, there’s indication from Microsoft that it could happen, “…it will enable mapping of all these photos on Bing Maps or Windows Live. I’m not committing to that.” Don’t be surprised if this appears as a new feature or product.
In the guide below I will show you how to geotag images in Windows Live Photo Gallery. If you have any comments or questions, please use the comments form at the end of the article.
Note: Windows Live Photo Gallery 2011 Beta was used for the screenshots below.
1. Click on the image you wish to geotag (you can select more than one image to geotag).
2. In the Home tab of the Windows Live Ribbon click on the Geotag button in the Organize group.
3. A pane will appear on the right of the screen . Click on Add Location under the Geotag heading and enter the location where the picture was taken.
That’s it! You just geotagged a photo, repeat for all of your photos.
A couple of things I noticed while using this feature
Geotagging is a bit slow, it appears that Live Photo Gallery is contacting a map server somewhere to pull the information, so be patient.
I found that hitting the Enter key usually brought up a list of possible matches to choose from.
I tried to geotag some pictures I have of the South Pole and it never came up on the results page, I even tried adding it without the location being found and it still didn’t let me add it (see below). So if Photo Gallery can’t find the location it still wont let you tag it, that should be changed.
I also tried entering GPS Coordinates and that too did not work. What if I wanted to tag pictures of a fishing trip and the only reference point is a coordinate? They should fix this as well.
Other than those minor issues, this is an awesome product considering it is still in Beta. Hopefully the Windows Live Team will read this feedback and act on it.
