There has been a lot of discussion around creating location aware content, but less about how it can be used. One area we are pushing very strongly is the use of geotagged images for navigation. With the growth in geotagged imagery it seems logical to use this imagery not just for showing the location of a picture on a map, but also as a destination that can be navigated to.

The image can essentially act as a ‘token’ (just like a vcard in Outlook) holding location information that can be distributed over the Internet (fixed or mobile) with the receiving device or application extracting the location information as a destination that can then be navigated to. An added bonus is that the image provides visual confirmation of the location.

But why use an image when you could just send co-ordinates? Primarily because the EXIF graphics standard already defines a set of standard GPS fields therefore as long as the receiving application can extract the co-ordinates we then have a de-facto common standard for exchanging destination information between devices.

What’s great with this approach is that it creates a market for both ‘professional’ content such as our POSIPIX Street and PoI images (http://www.trekwireless.co.uk/products.html) and also user generated content.

Tim Woolford