Back in December I did a post about digiKam's new tagging features. In that article I briefly mentioned another new feature that supports adding GPS coordinates to a photo's metadata. Today I'll explore how to do it.

While I don't know of any digital cameras that come with built-in GPS to automatically add coordinates, it is possible to use a GPS device to gather geolocation data separately. One device marketed for this purpose is Sony's GPS-CS1 GPS Device for CyberShot Digital Cameras. But if you are like me and don't own a GPS, don't despair, it's still easy to add the coordinates yourself.

digiKam can add coordinates in one of two ways. The first is by importing a GPX file and the second is by selecting a location from Google Maps. The coordinates you define through these methods include longitude, latitude, and altitude. If you use the Google Maps method then the altitude will always be set to 0. You can change it manually if you wish.

I used digiKam version 0.9 and kipi-plugins version 0.1.4 for this example.