When geotagging a photo, should the location be the camera position or the subject location?
Asked 5/5/2011
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If I photograph a distant subject with a telephoto or zoom lens and add GPS data manually, which location is usually more useful to store: the place where the camera was when I took the photo, or the place of the subject in the frame?
For example, if I photograph Alcatraz from Coit Tower in San Francisco, should the geotag point to Coit Tower or Alcatraz?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
15y ago
2 Answers
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Most of the time you have more use of the position from where you took the photo.
If you know from where the picture was taken, you can often from the photo see exactly which direction the camera was pointed. If you know the position of the subject, you might be able to see approximately which direction it was taken from, but seldom the exact position.
Of course, if you know that you will only ever be interrested in the location of the subject, you can discard any other information. Geotagging is always a bit of a compromise; it would be nice to have an exact three dimensional vector from the position of the camera to the position of the subject, but we only tag one point, and only in two dimensions.
Originally by user149. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user149
15y ago
0
Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.
Usually, geotag the camera’s location. That preserves where the photo was actually made, makes it easier to recreate the same viewpoint, and often lets you infer the subject direction from the image. If you only tag the subject location, you lose information because many different shooting positions can produce photos of the same subject.
That said, there isn’t one universal “correct” answer. It depends on why you geotag:
- If geotags are for your travel/history record or to document shooting locations, use the photographer/camera position.
- If geotags are mainly to describe or help people find the subject, tagging the subject location can make sense.
In an ideal system, metadata would include both the camera position and the camera’s direction/angle toward the subject, but with a single geotag point, the photographer’s location is generally the more informative default.
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