14 DAY TRIAL // One of the benefits of being a big tech company like Google is that you get access to a huge number of products and you can mix and match them as you please. Some combinations make a lot of sense, like the integration of Panoramio with Latitude, enabling users to automatically geo-tag their photos.
The feature comes especially handy if your camera doesn't have a built-in GPS, the vast majority don't, but you still want your pics to be linked to the place they were taken from.
You could do it by hand, it's not much of a hassle if you only need to geo-tag a couple of photos every once in a while, but even so, there are times when you can't really determine the location with any decent amount of accuracy. This is where Latitude comes in.
"By combining Panoramio and Google Latitude your photos get geotagged automatically as the time stamp of the photos is matched with your location record in Google Latitude History," Gerard Sanz, Panoramio's community manager, writes.
"To use this feature you need to explicitly enable it in your Settings page in Panoramio," he added.
"With your permission, Panoramio will access your Google Latitude History to find out your location at the time when your photos are taken, so make sure the time in your camera is correct and it matches the value you entered in the Panoramio Settings page," he explained.
If you're a regular user of Panoramio and you own an iPhone or an Android device, this is the simplest way of geo-tagging your photos automatically.
It's not much use if you planned to use those photos anywhere else than Panoramio, though, but maybe Google is thinking about building this functionality into Picasa as well.