Covering the length and breadth of the British Isles, Geograph is an ambitious scheme aiming to create a definitive photographic record of our varied archipelago.
The project stretches from the rocks of Great Wingletang on the southern side of St Agnes in the Isles of Scilly, to the windswept reaches of the Muckle Flugga lighthouse, the most northerly rock in the British Isles. It also has collected some 600,000 odd locations in between.
In a relatively short time, Geograph has covered Britain and Ireland in an enormous quilt of digital images, but the most impressive thing is that each have been snapped by amateur photographers keen to contribute to the new practice of "geotagging". What geotagging does is marry the art of photography with the precise science of digital cartography. In practical terms, all this really means is stamping digital images with the same grid references used by mapmakers, making them easy for others to locate on the internet. All Geograph asks its members to do is to upload images of the British Isles and place them accurately on the map. Simple.
Naturally, you can geotag anywhere on the map and the practice is not confined to our sceptered isles. Woophy.com does much the same, only on a global scale; Photrax.com uses similarly geo-referenced photos with information from Wikipedia and Google Maps to create a global travel guide. Perhaps most ambitious of all Maptales, invites bloggers to upload their geotagged images alongside their travel stories, giving rise to the new trend of "geoblogging".
What each of these sites does is offer us a glimpse into the near future. A few high-end digital cameras already automatically stamp their images with GPS (global positioning system) tags, placing the precise grid locations into the frame of the picture in the same way that most cameras record the date and time. It is worth noting that what appears on high-end cameras today gets added to your mobile phone some time tomorrow. Meaning that some day soon, geotagging will be as easy and almost as commonplace as taking a holiday snap.
