With "checking in" and referencing specific urban locations becoming a mundane part of sharing our lives on social media, we tend to forget that digital photos, even those from the pre-smartphone era, have another, more fine-grained way of telling us where they were taken: the EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format) data, which, alongside vital photo information like focal length, camera type used and aperture, also gives a very precise geographic location in coordinates. Photo Find is an app that endeavors to make this information usable, which in its raw form appears as longitude and latitude coordinates that have very long sequences of numbers after the decimal point.
Photo Find uses these numbers, and your iPhone's built-in compass, to instantly tell you your distance in meters from the spot you want to revisit.
Developer John Ganotis noted that many features similar to what Photo Find offers exist in iOS, such as the photo map feature and in various third-party apps, but there was no app that brought them all together in the way that he wanted.
"I found myself trying to track our hikes with RunKeeper to have a track, then see where we started and try to get back to the car," he wrote. "It worked OK for getting back to the car, but wasn’t a great system for marking spots."
If, like many people, you like to photograph scenic or meaningful moments, you'll have an easy way of accessing the exact spot you photographed—a beautiful stream you found somewhere in the woods, for example.
With images that tourists take of landmarks somewhat visually redundant, it would be interesting to use this app's easy-to-use treatment of geolocation to map out the minute differences in the vantage points of different photographers, creating some sort of crowdsourced, experiential way of viewing photos of different locations.
With the brilliantly simple interface of this particular app, we look forward to seeing more like it (and more for Android, as well) that make users aware of location in unique ways.