The Oxymoron Space

There are a lot of considerations you have to think about if you start archiving all your personal photos. Before I use Picasa as my primary tool for organizing the pictures I add some EXIF information about the place where the picture was taken, names of people who are on that picture, owner/copyright information and sometimes even additional facts about the lens I used. Later (and thats why I need all this)  I will use this EXIF information to display it in the gallery of my website. I have read that Canon has allready a special tag for the lens-type and I could even see the information in the software from Canon (like Zoombrowser EX) but I was not able to access this tag with ASP.NET and C#. Perhaps someone has found a solution and can leave me a note how to do this.

After I added the EXIF information I use Picasa to geotag the images, which I think will be more and more important as the GPS devices are getting cheaper and the Google Earth support for GPS location is quite good and simple (in the Pros version). You can find this feature in the Tools menu. You can even geotag multiple pictures at once and Google Earth integrates them right at the clicked location. Important is, that these coordinates are also stored in the IPTC tags of the picture itself. So when you copy your pictures all the additional information will be in the picture itself and not in an external database. The newest version of Picasa offeres searches in some of these EXIF tags like ISO and focal length.

The next step for me will be to read these coordinates from the pictures in my gallery. Then I can offer a link directly to a google map where one can see where this particular picture was taken.