Ipernity’s Geotagging feature employs Google maps and is clearly superior to ... what we were used to. The hybrid mode, especially, makes identifying motifs a lot easier, and you’ll be able to differentiate between objects which, in real life, are only a few yards apart.

Unfortunately, that’s not all there is to it.

It’s all very fine if your image focuses on only one thing: just taggit! (and don’t ask yourself if it makes much sense to geotag a tulip). But what if there are more? What if there are a great many? Sometimes, you could fix your tag to a single object, if it is prominent enough: the Eiffel Tower or Mississippi River. But you won’t always be as lucky as that.

Suppose you have a panorama shot: it shows the tops of the trees on the other side of the road, the wide valley of the river that happens to flow past your village, and also a chain of mountains far, far away. This example is purely hypothetical, of course.
Now where do you put your tag?

I wouldn’t know. You could use a small scale view of the map, and place the tag where all three elements –trees, valley, mountains– are covered. That wouldn’t satisfy me, but you might argue that you have determined a certain “average”. Alternatively, it could be your own location, if it can be identified. However, this would revalue an habitual location, for instance your balcony, in a way that you may not always be able to choose between the two criteria: you may have shot a particular building both from your balcony and from the street, isn’t it?

I find this all very difficult. Still, though I occasionally do have a bad conscience, I like the feature a lot. Somehow, it puts the obscurest of places on the map (quite literally) and thus ranks them among metropoles. And you also learn something, for instance, where your friends are at home...

I looked up one of my dearest Fl..., no, Ipernity friends. She appeared to live on a crossroads in Evansville, Indiana, probably trying to flag a ride (yes, I know my Robert Johnson!). She hasn’t deserved to live on the street –it really made me sad...