Guest blogger: Antony Pranata, Nokia Location Tagger team.

I have good news and bad news for you. The good news is Location Tagger has just been updated. The bad news is this version will be the last update on Beta Labs. Instead, location tagging will be integrated into selected future Nokia devices.

What’s new in this release?

• Persistent log. Now when you exit the application, your list of images in your logs tab will not disappear. When you delete an image from the Gallery of File Manager, the item will also be removed from the logs tag.
• File renaming. There is additional option in the Settings menu to rename tagged file. The file name will be added _NLT as suffix. For example, if the original file name is image001.jpg, it will be renamed to image001_NLT.jpg. This feature will allow you to easily differentiate between tagged and non-tagged files.
• Get location from cache. As you may know from our last posting that Location Tagger tags pictures with the last known position in the last 1 hour. If there is no last known position, it will put pictures in the queue until time-out. We added a new feature that allows you to get location from GPS device’s cache.
• Optimization and some bug fixes. This new version should run relatively faster than the previous one.

Lastly, I would like to thank everyone for sending in their feedback about Nokia Location Tagger. It has been great reading through all comments and suggestions for improvement. And although we have not yet been able to fulfil every wish, we sure feel we have improved Nokia Location Tagger with your help since its initial beta release.

- Antony

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Editor’s note: we will keep Nokia Location Tagger in active Beta Labs application list for two weeks, after which we will move it to the archive (or should we call this a graduate?). You can continue using it, but no need to send us feedback anymore. As Antony mentioned, the productized version keeps evolving as integrated part of Nokia devices, not as a standalone application. Thanks everyone for your contribution!!

- tommi

Guest blogger: Antony Pranata from Nokia Location Tagger team.

Hello everyone. We are back with the updated Nokia Location Tagger. What’s new?

• Support more devices. There were reports from the previous version that it does not work on many non-Nseries devices. This version should work on most S60 3rd Edition devices. Please let us know if it doesn’t work on your specific device/firmware. Note that you can use Nokia LD-4W if your device does not have built-in GPS module.
• Improved usability. Many of you mentioned that GPS takes some time to lock and sometimes you miss the moment. There are two improvements in this version.
  • If there is no GPS signal when you capture a picture, it will be tagged with the last known good position in the last 1 hour. The previous version uses 10 minutes only.
  • If there is no last known good position in the last 1 hour, the picture will be put in a queue until timeout. You can set the timeout value from the Settings menu. If your device is able to lock the position before timeout, all pictures in the queue will be tagged with this new position.
• Added “Show on map” feature. You can now select Options | Show on map menu from the Logs tab to show the location of the picture on Nokia Maps. This feature works only on S60 3rd FP1 devices with Nokia Maps installed, such as Nokia N95.
• Many bug fixes. We have fixed a nasty bug that may drain your battery very fast in certain situations.

We have also created a new Flickr group for Nokia Location Tagger. If you have great pictures that you want to share with other users, feel free to join the group and share your pictures.

One more thing, as mentioned by Kevin from S60 Multimedia blog, location tagging will be integrated on Nokia N82 soon. Anyway, we will leave Nokia Location Tagger available at Beta Labs to support other devices.

Link: Nokia Location Tagger at Beta Labs.

Guest blogger: Antony Pranata from Nokia Location Tagger team

Thanks to everyone who has participated in the first beta version of Nokia Location Tagger. We have received a lot of feedback from you. I am going to summarize it here.

Here is the list of most common problems:

• It does not work on non-Nseries devices, such as 6110, 6120, E51, etc. The current version has not been tested on all devices. We’ll be working to make it work on as many devices as possible.
• The Settings page is not shown properly on some devices and firmware versions.
• GPS lock takes forever. Although Location Tagger supports A-GPS; some users report that GPS lock takes longer than using Nokia Maps.

We have also received many suggestions for future releases, including:

• Support for cell-tower triangulation or WiFi positioning.
• Manual tagging, which allows the user to tag pictures that have been taken previously.
• Auto-start when Camera application is started. The current version supports auto-start when the phone starts up.
• Integration with other Nokia applications, such as Nokia Maps and Sports Tracker.
• Privacy tagging, which allows the user to tag with city center for example, instead of exact address. Many people don’t want to publish their addresses on the Internet.
• Added accelerometer data to allow 3D orientation.
• Added satellite status or GPS quality on the user interface.

Also, there have been some concerns about power consumption. Will Location Tagger drain the battery very fast? There is actually timeout value that can be set from the Settings page (by default, 5 minutes). When there is no camera activities after 5 minutes (default value), the GPS module will be turned off automatically. This way, the battery should not drain that fast.

Once again, thanks everyone! We’ll evaluate your feedback and come back to you soon.

PS: We realize that the current version is not perfect yet. It is not the final product. It is just the beginning.

Guest blogger: Antony Pranata, one of the primary forces behind Nokia Location Tagger

First of all, I would like to thank Tommi for giving me an opportunity to be his guest blogger. My name is Antony Pranata. I am currently working as a software engineer at Nokia. Some of you may already know me as the Screenshot guy or S60Tips.com blogger.

Why am I blogging here? Tommi has an idea of letting the team who develop the beta application to “talk” directly to the public. That’s the reason why I am here. I am part of the team who develop the Nokia Location Tagger application (thanks to Maarten) that we launched today.

That’s for the introduction part. Now, let’s talk about business.

Today, we proudly announce a new application for Nokia Beta Labs, Nokia Location Tagger. What is it all about? Nokia Location Tagger is a small application running on “selected” S60 3rd devices that allows you to tag pictures captured from Camera application with geographical coordinates from GPS. The tagging process itself is sometimes called geotagging or geocoding (see also this article at Wikipedia). Technically, the location information is stored in the EXIF header of your pictures (.jpg file).

What can we do with the tagged pictures? You can upload them to the photo sharing sites, such as Flickr, Panoramio and Picasa Web, so that your friends know where the pictures were taken. If you want to keep them private on your PC, some photo organizer applications, such as Picasa (combined with Google Earth), are able to display location information. Please read the instructions at Nokia Location Tagger web page.

Just to give you a little bit of background, location tagging is planned to be a seamlessly integrated part of Nokia experience. Before we reach that point, we decided to release a standalone application to give you a sneak preview. We would like to hear your thoughts already now. What do you think about the product? Do you have any problems using it? What features do you want to have? Even if you don’t like it, please also tell us.

Note that Nokia Location Tagger will not be the final solution of Nokia experience. In the future, we will be “integrating” the user interface of location tagging into Camera and Gallery applications (no longer as a standalone application).

Enjoy tagging your pictures!