Uploading Photos to Flickr from iPhone & Keeping the Geotag

FlickrOk, someone please explain to me why all the apps I use to upload photos to Flickr do not keep their original geotag? I know some of them allow you to add your current location but I’m never in the exact location I took the picture once I’m ready to upload it. I’ve tried Flickr’s official app, Mobile Fotos, and Flickit Pro and they all remove the geotag. The only way I’m able to upload pictures and keep the original geotag is to email them to Flickr. You can set this up here: http://www.flickr.com/account/uploadbyemail/ And if you want it to post to Twitter at the same time you can set that up here: http://www.flickr.com/blogs_add.gne

Here’s some sweet instructions from Flickr on how to customize your email when sending pictures:

You can use the subject line to give your photo or video a title and the body to add a description. You can also use a special code to add tags before you send your email.

Here’s the special codes:
Just type “tags:” in the subject line or body of the email followed by the list of tags you want added to the photo(s). (The rest of the subject line in is converted to the photo’s title and the body of the email becomes the photo’s description.)

Here’s an example of adding tags in action:
Subject: Lucy, my new cat tags: cute “black cat”
Body: Lucy does the funniest dance moves! Isn’t she cute?

Or you could send them in the body:
Subject: Lucy, my new cat
Body: Lucy does the funniest dance moves! Isn’t she cute?
tags: cute “black cat”

(If you include tags in the email body, they must be at the beginning of a new line.)


This isn’t as nice as using an app but I really don’t like that apps are taking out my geotag. What else are they taking out? The Mobile Fotos app even brightened my picture. Not kewl! I do like that Mail runs in the background so you don’t have to worry about closing the app. Mail also alows you to pick the size of the image you are sending. You can adjust the privacy settings of a pictures too by tweaking the email address a bit when sending your photos through mail:

With our upload system, you can add a little bit of text (the pink bits below) to your Flickr email address (the green bits below) to set privacy levels as you upload. These permissions will override the default upload permissions you set here.

Let’s say your magic email address is foo13bar@photos.flickr.com. Then you could use:

foo13bar+friends@photos.flickr.com – Visible to friends
foo13bar+family@photos.flickr.com – Visible to family
foo13bar+ff@photos.flickr.com – Visible to friends and family
foo13bar+private@photos.flickr.com – Only visible to you
foo13bar+public@photos.flickr.com – Visible to everyone

Tip: Save the addresses you use frequently to your address book so you can email on the fly.

PLEASE let me know if you know of a better app or another system you’re using to upload your photos from your iPhone mobily.

ScreenShots

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading...

Comments

  1. Yeah noticed the same thing… glad to know it’s not just mine.

    I also noticed that the photos show they were taken from an Apple Iphone 3GS instead of iphone 4…

  2. As you state the app you can use to get photos to flickr with the geotag is called mail. Why do we need another app? What I do is setup a mailbox on one of my domains something like photoupload@mydomain.com and have it forward to flickr, facebook and picasa.

  3. InstigatorX says

    @Jason – He already stated Mail will work, but one photo at a time? or cut-n-paste multiple photos? What a joke.

    @Douglas – PixelPipe retains the Geotags and works fairly well. Have you found any other apps?

  4. Flickr can’t read apples geotags. The only way to upload from an app is to find an app that shoots, tags and uploads in app. I use one called hipstamatic. It won’t shoot a photo without adding a filter, so it’s not everyone cup of tea. I am able to shoot photos with it and upload them from home later and allow flickr to show where it was shot automatically. If you hear of a camera app that does all the same without the filters, let me know!

  5. Don’t forget to tell flickr you want to enAble auto geotagging http://www.flickr.com/account/geo/exif/