Photo Geotagging is Magic

Derrick Story
4 min readDec 6, 2021
Location information for this photo displayed in the Preview app on a Mac.

The smartphone in your pocket knows where you are every minute and automatically records those locations to the pictures that you take with it. We call this function geotagging.

It’s particularly handy when traveling. Let’s say you don’t remember where you ate that amazing red and green breakfast in New Mexico. Was it Santa Fe or Albuquerque? If you took phone pictures that morning, all you have to do is go to your favorite photo app, review the geotags for them, and find the diner’s location on a map.

Smartphones are smart. But so are our digital cameras. And one of my favorite cameras, the Fujifilm X100V, can perform the same wizardry with the assistance of the iPhone in my pocket.

Geotagging with regular digital cameras is nothing new. The feature has been around for a while. But recording that data easily is fairly recent. We can thank improved Bluetooth technology for that.

The X100V uses Bluetooth 4.2, a low energy version. My iPhone 12 Pro Max comes with version 5, also with low energy consumption. What this means is that the camera and the iPhone can have an ongoing conversation, exchanging information in real time, without draining either battery.

Since the iPhone knows where I am every minute, it can share that location with the X100V so those coordinates can be added to the picture’s…

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Derrick Story
Derrick Story

Written by Derrick Story

Photographer, writer, podcaster — www.thedigitalstory.com — Editor of "Live View" on Medium.com.

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