The bad news: unless you have a high-end Nikon attached to a GPS, your camera is clueless about location.

You could buy a Ricoh with GPS card like I did, but it sucks. The GPS card goes where the memory card normally goes, so you’re left with 8 MB of built-in memory. Not many photos… And it isn’t a good camera but costs a lot.

However! You can buy Robogeo to sychronize the time stamps between your GPS log and photos. If the GPS says you were on the Golden Gate Bridge at 8:13 PM and you took a photo around that time….you get the idea.

Some camera phones have GPS and you can get a GPS card for a Treo 650, which has a decent camera. But I haven’t figured out whether they embed the location info into the EXIF. Anyone know?

Sometimes the location reported by your GPS is not what you want in your photo. If you stand on the Brooklyn Bridge and shoot the Empire State Building, you might prefer to have the location be the Empire State Building.

For those exceptions, you can look up latitude and longitude using Google Maps: find the spot on the map and double-click it. The map centers. Now click the Link to this page link. An URL will appear in your browser address bar. The first two numbers you see in it, reading from left to right, is the latitude and longitude. Copy and paste them to Robogeo and you’re set.

Easier by far is to use Smugmug’s Edit Geography tool. You find the location and it fills in latitude and longitude for you. But it does not yet burn it into the EXIF of your photo.

What’s your experience?