This could be helpful if you are phoning/texting/posting the location of a bird from the field.

Most cameras allow you to select what to display when reviewing images, including GPS coordinates if they were recorded. Perhaps the most simple is to read the coordinates directly on the camera. There’s more than one way to access location data from an Exif file for an image. But apropos to this topic, if your camera geotags a picture then the lat/long coordinates will also be found in the image’s Exif file. This is known as the Exif file (Exif is short for Exchangeable image file format), and records information such as the exposure settings used, camera mode, lens information, time and date, and a host of technical data I don’t really understand or care to understand at this point. ( Make sure to carefully set the time and date for this method to work well.) In this followup I’d like to demonstrate a few easy ways to recover the location coordinates from a digital photo.įirst, it is important to understand that any digital photo includes an embedded file with all kinds of metadata about the image. I also mentioned ways to retrofit cameras with aftermarket GPS receivers, and several commentators offered helpful ways to geotag photos using smartphone apps that match the digital time stamp on each image to the position recorded by the phone at that time. In my last post I mentioned the news that DSLR manufacturers are finally beginning to integrate GPS receivers into certain camera body models.

Exif data viewer gps coordinates