If you store photos on a service like Flickr you may want to "geotag" a picture so that a user can see on a map where the picture was taken. See for example this link on the full Flickr version of the picture.
No doubt there are much more elegant ways of doing this - post a comment if you know of one - but the cumbersome method I worked out involves the following:
- Convert the the UK Ordnance Survey Grid Reference of the spot to longitude and latitude with this 1998 web-based tool from David Harper and Lynne Marie Stockman. Thus NY690250 is Longitude 54.618332, Latitude -2.480000.
- Insert the longitude and latitude into this tool from Beeloop.
- Copy the resultant tags and text back into Flickr.
For more on geotagging in general see this page on the Mapbureau web site, and [20061020] this interesting 19/10/2006 piece by Stuart Yeates about some emerging problems with geotagging.
You may also want to use geotags with Google Earth. You can link a series of longitude and latitude coordinates together to create a "fly-over". For example, if you have Google Earth loaded on your PC or Mac, and click on this link to a 1 kB .kmz file (a small XML file that can be generated using Google Earth, and that Google Earth can interpret) you should be taken, within Google Earth, to an aerial view of the English/Scottish border. Click on the start button under "Places" and you should experience a rather soothing "fly-over" South to Middleton in Teesdale.
[Link to Suart Yeates post added 20/10/2006.]
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