Posts tagged App Store

I haven’t found an efficient way of uploading pictures from my iPhone to Flickr, but that all changed today. I found an application for the iPhone mentioned over at Lifehacker & it’s called Flickit developed by Green Volcano Software. It allows you to add photos from your iPhone library or take new shots directly with the camera. It also supports batch uploads (multiple photos). With each photo, you can add Flickr metadata such as title, description, and privacy settings. You can also assign tags, create new tags, sets, & tag photos with geolocation coordinates with the built-in geotagging function. I had a question regarding geotagging, so I sent an email to Green Volcano support. I use to upload my iPhone pictures via email to Flickr which keeps the EXIF location data. I noticed when uploading a picture via Flickit already within my iPhone library, the location is always unknown. So, you really can’t use the built-in geotagging function for older pictures unless you happen to be at the location from which you took the picture. My question to them was, “Does Flickit strip the data before uploading to Flickr?” I got an answer within an hour from them:

There are two kinds of geolocation tags on Flickr:

One is the geolocation data embedded in the EXIF metadata for a photo. You can see this in the ‘More properties’ link when viewing photo details.

The other type of geotag is the Flickr ‘map’ tag. This lives outside the EXIF data, and is seen as the ‘Taken in ‘ link in the photo details.

If you email a photo to Flickr using iPhone’s mail app, it preserves all the embedded EXIF data, and you can see the first type of GPS coordinates if you look at the ‘more properties’ link. If you have the special “Import EXIF location data” setting turned ON for your Flickr account, then Flickr will automatically extract first type of geotag from the EXIF metadata into the 2nd Flickr version of the geotag. Otherwise, you still need to manually create the Flickr version of the geotag.

The problem is that there is a bug in the iPhone SDK that strips *all* EXIF data from a photo. (iPhone Mail seems to not have this problem) Currently, all iPhone developers are stuck having to re-create the EXIF data. Unfortunately, none of us will be able to re-create the GPS data from the original shot, and you can see this if you try to upload using any of the other iPhone Flickr apps. Some apps re-create the basic EXIF data, but GPS will always be missing.

So, the short of it is that you need to explicitly geotag the photo using the built-in geotagging function of Flickit in order for geotagging to ’stick’. There is no way to turn the original GPS coordinates into the Flickr version of the geotag.

His answer cleared everything up & hope that the bug in the iPhone SDK gets fixed or perhaps this is intentional by Apple for whatever reason. This is an app that I would have paid for, but you can download it for free.

[SOURCE: Lifehacker, Green Volcano Software]

Last month I listed a few of my favorite Apps for the iPod Touch and was hoping for a native Sirius App. There are currently two native Sirius Apps being developed for the iPhone/iPod Touch that will be released within the iTunes App store. The first one is called StarPlayr and will actually play both Sirius and XM feeds. The other, created by Millard Software, will be called uSirius. Both Apps are currently going through beta testing, so it’s unknown at this time when they will be officially released.