The geotagging ideal is for a digital camera or camera phone to always know its location, and automatically and instantly add the exact location to a picture's metadata, just like time and date are now added to all the photos you currently take. Location information can later be "read" by software that can do powerful things.

To do that, handset makers, software developers, carriers and others must all work together to support the greater cause of geotagging.

Invention isn't necessary, per se. All the technologies exist to make this ideal happen. Autogeotagging combines the use of a phone's camera, GPS and data transfer capabilities, as well as the ability of the camera to encode coordinate data.

One obvious use for geotagged photos is to organize online galleries by map. But automatically geotagged photos would enable you to:

-- Perform enhanced indexed searches. If you need to find a single photo on your PC, geolocation readable by a search tool would be a huge help. At the time I wrote this, for example, I had 47,450 JPEG photos on my PC. Most of them have file names like "PICT0012.JPG," "DSC01814.JPG" or "IMG00015.jpg" depending on what camera or phone produced them. I often try, but fail, to find a specific photo. But if I could add geographic information, for example, tell my search engine to find all the pictures I took in 2001 while in Chicago, I would almost always find the pictures I was looking for.