Steve pointed me to a GPSPhotoLinker, a Mac OS X app that takes a set of photos and a GPX (GPS eXchange) track file, and by matching time stamps, inserts GPS coordinate data into the EXIF fields of each photo. God bless grad students, they have the time and inclination to implement stuff I only talk about :-)
This is definitely a step in the right direction. Now I can take a GPS device with me, tell it to take regular waypoints every X minutes, then merge that data back into the pictures at the end of the day.
Of course, what I really want is for the camera to add the GPS data when the photo is taken, right? But putting a GPS chip in the camera may be financially and physically prohibitive for consumer-grade cameras. On top of that, there may be other applications for GPS, such as navigation... perhaps my phone could use the web to look up an address, then use a GPS device to guide me there. Nokia seems to be moving in that direction with WayFinder and their new Nokia GPS LD-1W:
So the logical conclusion would be to use such a BlueTooth enabled GPS unit along with a BlueTooth enabled camera. It's not enough to just have BlueTooth... just like the cellphone, the camera has to support the NMEA protocol, which allows the GPS to provide real-time tracking data to a client device. As of now, I can only find one camera with BlueTooth (ConcordEye-Q Go), with the stated functionality of transferring images to the computer wwirelessly.
But geez, this feels closer than ever! Maybe Nokia will be first to realize that they've got the entire infrastructure, and so will just start GPS stamping on their camera phones...
Next up: A GPS Named Region web service.
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