Geotagging Digital Photos in All Terrains

Lots of people are jumping on the bandwagon and buying waterproof GPS-enabled cameras so that they can geotag their underwater photos. This is a great idea, but it does run into a few snags. First of all, GPS doesn’t work underwater. You’d think that submarines used GPS to locate themselves, but they can only do that when they surface. It turns out that submarines use an “inertial navigation system” that relies on “precise accelerometers and gyroscopes to keep track of every change in the submarine’s speed and direction.” When you match that up with GPS data from the last time that the submarine surfaced, you get an extremely accurate location.

Obviously, an “inertial navigation system” doesn’t make sense for a digital camera that costs a few hundred dollars. So how do today’s GPS-enabled waterproof digital cameras work? It’s pretty simple. They grab GPS coordinates periodically while the camera is able to get the signal from the GPS satellites. It then saves the location in memory and uses it to tag the photo. As long as your camera picked up a signal before you went underwater and you don’t travel too far while you are beneath the water’s surface, then you should get pretty accurate date for your geotagging.

This is great news for snorkelers, scuba divers, and fishermen.

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