Recently I discussed geotagging with Photobucket, Webshots, and Kodak Gallery. The conclusion was that it was possible, but complicated to geotag Photobucket, but not the others. I’ve come across two other photo sharing services that show promise as far as geotagging is concerned. These are SmugMug and Zooomr.
SmugMug
SmugMug has no free service. If you’re going to play you have to pay. Their philosophy is that they provide plenty of value-added services, and that you get what you pay for. As such, I wasn’t able to sign up for an account and post my test images.
Even though I couldn’t get the real SmugMug experience, I was able to determine several things about their geotagging services. If you click on “browse”, an embedded Google map is prominently displayed entitled “photos taken around the world.” Obviously geotagging is a feature promoted by SmugMug. There are also several varieties of RSS feeds available, which can be parsed through various GeoRSS readers.
Zooomr
Zooomr looks like it’s trying to add some of the same features as Flickr. I was able to sign up for a free account and upload my two test pictures. I was able to tag both images as I uploaded them. Zooomr goes on to add links for Wikipedia and Technorati for each of the tags.
As far as geotagging is concerned, I could add triple tags, if I wanted. However, there is a tab called “Geo” where you can drag-n-drop the image onto a map. I couldn’t see any way to export the information to a KML file. It could only be viewed on their embedded Google Map.
The RSS feed appears to be similar to Webshots feed – all of the images are enclosed as one RSS item, rather than separate items for each image. This kind of defeats the purpose of geotagging. You can’t parse the location data from the individual images.
Conclusions:
Smugmug heavily promotes its geotagging, but it looks like you’ve got to pay for their services in order to take full advantage of their capabilities. Zooomr’s geotagging looks like it is somewhat limited, due to the lack of true RSS and export to KML.
[tags]geotagging, SmugMug, Zooomr, photography, photo sharing[/tags]