With the rise of digital photography, social media, and geotagging, picturesque natural landmarks that were once relatively undisturbed are now swarming with more and more visitors every year. Vox made this 5-minute video on how geotagged viral photos are having a huge impact on nature.
A quick peek at the EXIF data of most photos you find online these days will reveal not only what (mostly) smartphone they were taken with, it will also reveal the exact GPS coordinates where that photo was taken. That's how one researcher built the "Accidental Geography" map.
Remember Instagram's Photo Maps? No worries, neither did we until we found out today that, shockingly enough, Instagram has decided to kill off a feature they say "was not widely used."
Wary of sharing location data in photos? Get this: a burglary suspect arrested last week is accused of using geotagged photos from Instagram and Facebook to find female college students, break into their homes, and steal their underwear.
If you're not comfortable with the idea of uploading photos to the Web with geotag data baked into the file, there are some easy ways you can scrub the data to protect your privacy. Both Mac and Windows computers offer simple solutions for quickly removing sensitive location info from your photo files.
Every year Instagram goes through their data and compiles a list of the ten most Instagrammed locations of the year. And while they haven't published the list themselves yet, they were kind enough to send it over to us.
So, without further ado, join us as we count down the top 10 geotagged locations of 2014 on Instagram.
If you care about endangered animals that are hunted for their parts, here's something important you should keep in mind: make sure you scrub the GPS data on the images prior to sharing them online. Poachers have reportedly been turning to geotagged photos on social networks in order to find out where they can make their next kill.
The photograph above shows the location where the following Tweet was posted:
Love hiding in the back at work because I have a 35 year old creeper. #scared #help
It's one of the photos in a project titled Geolocation: tributes to the Data stream, by photographers Nate Larson and Marni Shindelman. Each image in the series shows the location were a particular geotagged Twitter Tweet was posted.
The saga of anti-virus pioneer John McAfee's run from the law is a strange one, but this much is clear: McAfee wishes geotagging wasn't a feature built into modern cameras. After a month of fleeing from Belizean law enforcement after a neighbor was found murdered, the software tycoon was finally taken into custody this week, largely due to a single photo loaded with GPS data.
Flickr introduced an innovative location-based privacy feature today called “ …
Last year map geek Eric Fischer created heat maps showing where Flickr photos are taken in large cities and comparing tourist vs. local hotspots. Now he's back again with beautiful maps showing geotagged Flickr photos and Twitter Tweets, and the maps aren't limited to cities -- there's maps for continents (see North America above) and even the whole world! The orange dots show photos, the blue ones indicate Tweets, and a white one means both were found in that location.
As photo-making devices become more and more location aware, many people unwittingly give up a lot of privacy by …
The Geotaggers’ World Atlas is an interesting series of images by …