One of the first things I did when I got my phone was to disable some of the Google location services and to turn off embedded GPS data in photos. The former helps Google (and others) track where you are at all times. Google has other ways of knowing where I am, but if I can make it a little tougher for them, I’m OK with that. I also didn’t see much need for having every photo include the GPS location for where it was taken. But early in my travels, I turned both of those settings back on.
Your location history can be used to see where you went on any given day. If you’re logged into your Google account on your Android device, that data appears to be collected automatically. I’m sure Apple has something similar for their devices as well. After a day of walking randomly up and down side streets in a foreign city, you can use your location history to see where you actually were, and try to figure out what some of the buildings you saw were. It’s a little creepy to see that data in one place, but it can be quite helpful at times.
When you enable the GPS tagging on your photos, it gives you the same ability. You can pull up a photo and see where it was taken, which will help you remember what the picture is of, especially when you’re taking photos of your fifth temple of the day. But there’s another use for the GPS tagging that I realized a few months ago: You can use the GPS feature to find places that you want to go to.
There have been a few times when I was in a taxi and I passed an interesting building or a market that I wanted to check out. One option would be to tell the driver to stop and you could get out there, but that’s not always practical. If you quickly take a picture, even if it’s blurry or of something unrelated, you can still get the GPS location from it and you can use Google Maps to see what is in that area and you can plan to revisit when you can. Once I figured this trick out, I ended up taking a lot of random pictures that were complete junk, but they helped me find whatever it was that I wanted to see. I have several blurry photos of the inside of taxis, which aren’t exactly Ansel Adams, but they got me back to the market or temple that I was interested in.
In the past, photos were taken to remind us of things that we’ve seen and experienced, but now we can take photos to help us see something new in the future.
** This isn’t why some of the photos on my blog are blurry. That’s because I’m a bad photographer in general.
