There are two ways (that I’m aware of) to geotag your photos:

1. Manually locate the location of your photos on a map such as Google Maps and then record the info onto the photos’ metadata
2. Record the GPS location as you take your photos, and write the location to your photos (either as they’re taken or later)

PC Magazine evaluated three products to help you do the latter by recording the GPS locations as you shoot. They looked at the Pharos Trips and Pics, the ATP GPS Photo Finder and the Merax Photo Finder GPS, and gave the thumbs up (though not Editors’ Choice) to the last one.

While they didn’t review the one I bought some time back, a GlobalSat DG-100, if you’re in the market for one, it’s worth reading what the PC Mag folks have to say.

MSNBC has one of the better collections of journalistic photos depicting the devastation of southern China’s 7.9 magnitude earthquake. The earthquake was so strong that many aftershocks registered near 6.0 magnitude. Photo number 4 is particularly artistic, while photo number 9 shows the very large boulders that were dislodged by the earthquake. The last photo, number 26, shows a scene from Beijing of people who evacuated from buildings waiting in the streets, 900 miles north of the epicenter. That’s like having an earthquake in San Francisco, CA, with people in Tucson, AZ evacuating.

Wired.com just published an article on geotagging. It’s really a general overview of what it is and how one might go about starting this. If you’re new to this area, it’s probably a good read.

I’ve been trying (but not very hard) to find a good software to do this both for photos without GPS data , and also for photos that do have GPS data captured separately with a GlobalSat DG-100. I Googled and found a list of candidates here. I might write about it in the future, but if you have experiences with any of the software or, or have a recommendation, drop me a note.

…and Facebook and Photobucket and Picasa.

Photoshop Express has inked a deal with many photo websites to allow editing of your photos on those sites in Photoshop Express. I’ve formerly written about Photoshop Express itself and how I wasn’t going to put my photos on that site, because of it’s bad user policies, but now you don’t have to, if you wish to use the online editing capabilities.

You just need to click to login to your photo website from Photoshop Express, and it’ll load all your photos from your photo website for browsing. This transfer of images becomes rather slow if you have a lot of photos.

Editing a Flickr photo on Photoshop Express

While the editing controls aren’t as plentiful as a software like Lightroom, what would you expect anyway for a free online tool? It’s definitely quite sufficient for basic editing, with controls for Auto Correct, White Balance, Red Eye Removal, Fill Light, Saturation, B&W settings, etc. All I needed to correct my underexposed shot from the Portland Japanese Garden was a little exposure control and fill light. BTW, the image above hasn’t been corrected yet, in case you’re wondering.

Once you’re done, Photoshop Express will save the edited image as a different photo with the same name into your original photo site. If you’re happy, you can now delete the old photo.

Fotki had much potential, but in the end it failed to make the cut for me as I search for a photo hosting site.

Fotki

• Excellent user rights! It’s Terms of Service Agreement actually indicates that it claims no ownership rights to your images and that they will not use your images for marketing purposes or any other purposes without obtaining the Member’s express permission. Now that’s something to cheer about.
• The main white-backgrounded Fotki page is particularly busy. There’s way too much going on, and lacks a sense of polish-ness to the site. Also the name of the service doesn’t help to make it professional-like.
• Not quite as interactive as Flickr. It has fields for comments, but you cannot add your own tags, for instance. You can view EXIF data of images, but not all metadata embedded in the image. It also shows GPS data as part of the EXIF info, but there are no provisions to see geotagged photos on a map. The non-full-sized images have their EXIF data striped from the images themselves. Only the original images retain the EXIF data.
• Not the most intuitive because options are both on the left-hand pane, and associated with the item (album/photo). You need to look at both to see what you can do. Too many ways to upload photos (JPG, PNG, GIF, BMP, TIF, PSD!) . You can use their website to upload individual photos, a desktop software to upload photos with right-click context menu per photo or per directory, FTP uploading (premium membership only), fetching from another site, etc. Nice. Very basic editing features, such as rotating, or flipping horizontally or vertically. No link to different sized photos, only the original size. Uses keywords from Lightroom exported photos as tags.
• Another site with subpar slidehow feature. Only displays a smaller image regardless of original size. Makes me appreciate how Flickr automatically scales the slideshow images based on the size of the browser and the original photo.
• Free with miserly 50MB of space with ads. The premium membership gives unlimited space with no ads, and provides seller features as well, at a 15% commission.
• Beyond being a photo site, each member also has space for videos (not a whole lot given the 50MB free space), a guestbook (why have this?), and a journal (for photo blogging).

Here’s a case of taking the right steps forwards — excellent user rights, PSD and TIF uploading, seller features, multiple ways to upload photos, but many steps back as well — small 50MB free space, sad slideshow features, no geotagging features, overly busy and unintuitive site, which is really too bad as it had potential.