Geotagging in Picasa

A cool feature I played with while sorting out some photos last night is the Geotag option in Picasa. It's been there for a little while, but I haven't gotten around to looking at it. The implementation is pretty slick: you select one or more photos in Picasa, select "Geotag" and it opens up Google Earth. For each photo, you pinpoint a spot on earth and tag it, or tag a whole group of photos with the same location.

I think this kind of linking back photos to their real world locations is fascinating, and would happily go through and geotag all my old travel photos, except it doesn't really do much yet. For instance, I use Picasa Web Albums, but when I upload an album all the geotag information is lost.

All that geotagging appears to do so far is let you view your photos in Google Earth, which isn't quite as convenient. I would have expected Google to do some amazing integration with Google Maps, live, inside your online photo album, but there's nothing. Not even a latitude/longitude listed in the "photo details" section. Rather disappointing.

On the bright side, knowing Google's knack for creating cool new ways to integrate their services, I know something like that can't be far off. Especially after seeing their extremely impressive new Street View in Google Maps yesterday, I'd expect they'll do it even better than I can imagine.