So I got thinking the other day (as you do),  wouldn't it be great if when I take a picture on my Windows Mobile device I could embed in the image the location of where I took the photo, i.e the longitude and latitude from a GPS.

So reading around the web,  it looks like there is an already an established way of adding location and other meta information to a JPEG and a whole host of other image formats known as EXIF.

Furthermore tools like Google's Picasa let you take your photo collection and with the correct EXIF tags hidden away in your image lets you see your holiday snaps plotted directly on a map.    Other photo services like Flickr also comprehensively support geo-encoded pictures.  

So what's out there in the world of Windows Mobile to support such an established standard?   Answer, not much that I can find. 

Mark Arteaga  (of Opennetcf fame) did a piece a while back one reading the tags see - http://blog.opennetcf.org/marteaga/default,month,2007-02.aspx

Mark's solution is great getting close to what I'm trying to achieve however it doesn't write the tags (doh) just reads.

So further investigation reveals some good Perl libraries the do the job which could be wrapped into a web-service.  Such as Phil Harvey's ExifTool at -

http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/

In a addition other tools that will take a track from a GPS and using the timestamp of the photo and achieve the geo-encoding result such as -

http://www.robogeo.com/home/

However we are still missing the holy grail of being able to encode as we take the picture on the device.    Maybe its time for a community project guys?