User:Jim.henderson

This user has file mover rights on Wikimedia Commons. (verify)

This is my own User Page, which contains my autobiography, sporadic blog and general wikiphotographical nattering. My talk page can be found by clicking my talk page where everyone tells me what a splendid fellow I am or more often how I'm ruining everything. Category:Jim Henderson (Wikipedian) has my pictures.

Subpages:

A New Yorker since the 1960s, I've always enjoyed writing and bicycling, and in the autumn of 2006 began writing in Wikipedia (logically enough, my userpage there is en:User:Jim.henderson) about what I learned while bicycling. In October of the following year, a relative decided to get rid of a slightly broken Nikon Coolpix 2200 camera, which I used to start snapping pictures during my travels about town and uploading them to Wikipedia NYC geographical articles.

Bought a better and not broken camera in February '08, a Canon point and shoot A570IS tourist model. Advised to send my pictures to Commons instead, I started doing that at the beginning of May. Took weeks to get used to the differences, but the advantages in categorizing and sharing are worth it. Warm weather encourages more outdoors time, which brings a great increase in quantity if not quality of pictures.

Geotagging Camera

This user geocodes.

My wish list was:

Automatic Geocoding in EXIF
Shorter time between shutter and zoom
Sensitivity, so low light doesn't make blurs

The Nikon P6000 looked like it might do the job, so I bought it Feb 16, 2009 and have studied it. Indeed its sensitivity lets it take less blurred photos in a gloomy subway station. The delay after the snap until zoom is activated seems little changed, alas.

My usual drive-by shooting style makes GPS important. I seldom spend many minutes in one place to get establishing shots and look for subtle angles, but rather take snapshots several meters apart and then pedal to the next victim on my hit list. Sometimes an interesting building a few blocks off my track redirects me, and a series of such happenstances may send me wandering in entirely unexpected directions. Due to lack of clear view of the sky, the camera's GPS rarely receives enough satellite signals here in Manhattan, except along the waterfront and on uptown hilltops lacking foliage. Outer Borough reception is more frequent, but often the camera remembers where it was five minutes ago, before I pedalled a quarter or half mile away. At first I uploaded the picture and later corrected the Wikimedia geotag online. Since Autumn 2009 with a more modern computer I can easily correct the location offline, and in any case a location that needs manual correcting is much better than not having an automatic geotag at all.

For pictures that are already in Commons and never had a geotag, I use This Google Maps crosshair page adapted from a German one by moving the crosshair from Europe to Lower Manhattan. Zoom in, move the map so the crosshair falls on the camera location, and click on the crosshair which produces a help balloon with Wiki {{Location}} template filled out for that location. Paste it into the file description and add a "heading:SW" or whatever direction the camera was pointing, save, and presto, the map will show the blue and red roundel for this camera location.

The Web page geolocator provides a sometimes easier method.

There's also an external page about free geotagging and software and related topics and other information in our own Commons:Geotagging page. A tool for geotagging can be installed: Ald-Hjl-Koord-en.kmz.

Cats

Many pictures in Commons are poorly described and categorized, or not at all. Of course many are also just bad pictures, but I can't do much about that. Anyway when I see an interesting pic in Wikpedia and jump to its Commons page, I check and fix the cat and descrip. This leads to discovering disorderly and overstuffed categories which, if I've got the time, I rearrange and destuff by creating subcats. And sometimes find hidden gems that way.

Oh. In June 2008 I learned of Category:Image cleanup templates which is handy for post upload improvements, and then I started giving meaningful names to my pictures. In June 2009, learned of Wikimedia techblog.

2010

Progress: With cat wrangling and geotagging for old pictures as well as uploading new ones, at the beginning of 2010 my Commons watchlist hit 5000, 2100 of them being my pix, the others more geotagging than category adjustments. In mid-February my Wikipedia watchlist fluctuated around 5400 and a few new pictures near Madison Square pushed my Commons watchlist above that point on Feb 14. Edit(and upload) counter. Early April, watchlist passed 6000.

Wow; I have very much been neglecting this page, due to more fun with pictures. 7400 pictures and categories on watch now, the majority being there due to geotagging someone else's. I found out about the useful {{GeoGroupTemplate}} , very handy. Jim.henderson (talk) 20:36, 1 November 2010 (UTC)

July, retired from the phone company. More bicycling and photography.

2011

Mid January I bought my first mobile phone, a en:Samsung M910 Intercept with Internet, GPS and camera. Pictures are somewhat poorer in quality than my real camera but much more reliably geotagged. I no longer carry my separate camera every day, just on photographic expeditions. The camera phone's Google Maps program tells me about nearby Wiki articles, which I check to see whether I should take time to try to make better pictures. After an injury in April I became more dependent, often using the little "W" symbols on the map to direct my path even after my healed rib allowed me to climb on the bike again. This produced richer hunting and a backlog, usually at least two months, in processing the pictures.

Few of my uploaded pictures are from the camera phone except when the real camera runs out of storage or power or something, or I want to be sure of the geotag. The camera phone is more slippery and subject to blurring when light is poor, and its touchscreen controls don't work with gloves. Next year a bigger, better camera phone might replace both, or else I'll just go for a bigger real camera than the P6000.

Early in November the upload wizard began reading EXIF locations and converting instantly to a location template. This quickness is a big improvement and helped me discover that my adjustments by Picasa/Google Earth are a major source of failed tags, so I moved to using MSPPT exclusively despite its lower precision.

2012

Goodness, almost a year since my hypothetical fans got an update. I uploaded more thousands of pictures, using the Upload Wizard since that started working well. Other editors began making and diffusing categories, with two benefits: I get more time for other things, and they usually do it better. I started refining my Pro Photo Tools coords with Picasa alone, which is less powerful than when combined with GE but more reliable on my old Windows Vista computer. I replaced my little old smartphone in July with a HTC EVO V 4G with much bigger screen, which is a help with the maps. Early September I started using the WTM Android app to find targets, which works well except

it seems to have crippled Google Map's ability to go to a Wikipedia page, and
it drains the battery quickly, so when using it on the bike I must keep the phone turned off most of the day.

Mid September the Nikon P-6000 which had become flaky with heavy use and some abuse finished dying, so I bought a Nikon P-510, bigger, heavier and mightier, but the GPS availability disappointed me so I brought it back for a little Nikon AW-100 which much more often knows where it is, and even provides a compass direction in EXIF. Buttons are inconveniently small, however. In October I began using Geosetter [1] whose complexity harbors many pleasant features including camera heading, which alas is not extracted by the Upload Wizard.

In December the Mobile Web Beta test version of Wikipedia got an upload button on every article, soon relegated to the Alpha (dragon) test version for bugs which for me don't get in the way of its high efficiency http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:MobileFrontend/Photo_upload]. Reliability of my windows Vista computer deteriorated, so I wiped, reformatted and reinstalled most software but not Geosetter which I suspect of being part of the unreliability, or Picasa due to my learning to make some use of the mighty GIMP.

2013

New toys in Feb:

Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 replacing my old 10 inch netbook (mightiest computer I ever owned). Handy for looking things up as they appear in TV news. Also during lectures for note taking, at dinner for showing off what Wikipedia can do, etc. Replaced it in May with a Dell XPS-10 tablet when a relative needed a tablet. Mindows 8 RT has a nice Adobe Photoshop Express, a simple photo retoucher. No EXIF geotag adjuster. Can't see Wikipedia's video.
Specialized Tri-Cross bicycle with Extra-Large frame. Fastest one I ever owned, good for hilly and daylong trips of tens of miles for which the little folding Brompton bike is inadequate.

Summer, replaced my Nikon AWB-100 with a Nikon P-330. Better pictures when light is poor; much less reliable locations by GPS. Clerking old pictures somewhat burned up the time I would have used for examining and uploading new ones.

2014

Time to vent about February's decision Commons:Requests for comment/MP4 Video to stick with only Free Software video formats that other Websites don't use and most consumer computers cannot see. Terrible idea. My old Android phone and my new Windows 8 RT tablet, for example, cannot see Wikipedia's moving pictures. Surely I'm not alone. Sales of old fashioned desk and notebook computers are declining and stagnating, respectively, while close to a million smartphones are sold most days worldwide and a million tablets every week or two. Those are mostly people who can't see our videos but can see Youtube, Netflix etc. Yes, I could search and probably download the necessary Android software for the phone. For the RT tablet it doesn't seem to exist, but I've got an old desk computer that can see our videos.

And what about the clueless hundreds of millions? Most are not computer fixers or auto mechanics or plumbers by trade. When their pipes are clogged they rely on a pro. But when they can't see our video, the sweet and bright people of the free software community recommend that they identify the cause, find out which viewer or browser will fix it, and take care of it themselves. Disregarding that most smartphone users don't know what a "file format" is. Yes, file formats are as important to modern life as fuel pumps and drainpipe elbows, so it would be ideal for everyone to learn how to do elementary repairs and upgrades by themselves. No, that's not realistic for the ignorant majority. So, those millions jump to the conclusion that Wikipedia, unlike other popular Websites, is broken. They're right, even if they don't know that it's a dumb Wikipolitical failure by the thousands (or hundreds) in our little community. Huff puff, that's enough ranting for awhile.

April

Decided to start listing sites that use my photos. Last year I found a few but didn't get the URL. Presumably many more have escaped my notice.

Brownstoner

2017

Been a long time since I blogged. Since then I've been photographing somewhat less, and put more time into sorting pictures that are a hundred years old or more. They're better than mine, and cover places and people that are long gone.

I lost my big Nikon geotagging camera at Wikiconference North America San Diego. Replaced it with a bigger Nikon P610 I bought used via Amazon. It was discontinued in favor of models without GPS. Outdoors, it gets a fix almost as often as the camera phone, though with usually bigger errors. Like, the next street instead of across the street. I usually adjust the location manually before uploading, but that's easier if the file already has a rough location. What's wrong with the P610 is, it's big, apparently because many buyers who want GPS also want the greater power of a big zoom camera.

Tour guide

See User:Jim.henderson/Tour guide

Cameras vs Computers

Target maps

There has been some progress this summer 2014 in guiding Wikiphotographers to unphotographed places. They include a somewhat rough "Unvisited" app for Android and iOS, and two Wikimedia Labs pages:

Alas, an Android app called "Geoflow" has turned out to be handier even though it does not say whether there is a photo.

Upload count

I am surprised that "Contributions" at the top of my page does not say how many pictures I have sent, nor does "Uploads". However, uploadsum brings a result:

July 5 2015 Total editcount : 51533 Total uploadcount : 6512 Total size : 8 GiB

Dec 8 2015 Total editcount : 56001 Total uploadcount : 6730 Total size : 8 GiB

Oct 17 2017 Total editcount : 76886 Total uploadcount : 7533 Total size : 11 GiB

March 20, 2018 Total editcount : 82370 Total uploadcount : 7918 Total size : 12 GiB

Notable photographer

An editor for a small local news website noticed that he had used many of my photos, and called me for an interview. I prefer doing business in person, and went to downtown Brooklyn. Nice bright young fellow. What's happening to this world? Most the young people I meet nowadays are smarter than I ever was, and much more pleasant. He recorded it, and the following day he published a rather flattering account. Queens Daily Eagle. Errors are few and small and umm, mostly more pleasing than the precise truth, so I recommend it.

The Queens reporter for cable news channel NY1 took this as a hint, and also made a segment about me: Wikipedia photographer

Separately, early in 2024 our favorite Wikipedian showbusiness personality flattered me on a list of unnamed but identifiably described Stakhanovites. [2].

Draft of lightning talk on Wikiphotography

Wikiphoto software

See User:Jim.henderson/Camera phone

darktable

Being out of town a week and a half in late summer 2019, I decided to download the free darktable, mainly seeking its geotagging and photo adjustment features. I have much difficulty understanding it, and it seems a major part of the problem is my using it on a small laptop with usually no mouse running room. This program is not designed to work well with limited resolution and only a touchscreen. So, until I can return to easier desktop work, this is not for me. Jim.henderson (talk) 11:05, 2 September 2019 (UTC)

Handy links

I often try to fix the locations of pictures of buildings and other features long gone, and have found a few relevant websites:

Historic Aerials photos of mostly urban places in USA
Old Maps Online worldwide
Glamorgan picture use by category
WikiShootMe in Manhattan
edit counter
Searching for pictures that have locations but not categores:

incategory:"Media with geo-coordinates needing categories" 40° 73°

Searching for pictures from a collection and on Beekman Street in New York:

incategory:"Gottscho-Schleisner Collection" "place|New York" Beekman

Wolfgang Mayr Sundial from Munich mounted wrong

wiki.maps nyc [3]

Queens Name Explorer [4]

Queens Memory Project

Etherpad about maps in NYC https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/wikinycmap1

Categories to diffuse

Favorites

32 Avenue of Americas
Bethesda angel
Eventi Hotel, 6th Avenue
Winthrop Shelter Pavilion
Central Park
Former factory in Brooklyn
Arthur Kill
Uptown retaining wall
20th Precinct Brooklyn Police
Hudson River sunset
Scene from King John
74th St - Roosevelt station
Storm damage in Brooklyn
General Sherman
Sherman, and Plaza Hotel
Taxi!
Dining during the plague
Newark Penn Station
Ribs holding up a road
Commuter
Guasavino ceiling
Mezzanine of Pavonia Station, Jersey City
Trump Place from mid-Hudson
Church in Bayonne, NJ
JFK Airport
All Saints Church, Brooklyn
Dipway Arch, Central Park
Editing at MoMA
Imperial Apartments, Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn
St Patrick's Old Cathedral
Construction in downtown Yonkers
Bascule bridge in Elizabeth, NJ
Stockholm
Hudson Park, NYC
Horace Greeley statue
Bethesda Terrace
Spruce and Nassau Streets
Sunnyside Yard
AirTrain and TWA Flight Center
Brooklyn Museum
Space Shuttle Enterprise
8 Spruce Street
Church of St Vincent de Paul in Bayonne, NJ
Outdoor dining, theoretically
Kreischer House, Tottenville, Staten Island
Ignatius Loyola complex
Miller Highway and Trump Place
Massapequa Creek
Bow Bridge with snow
Brooklyn Boro Hall
Jersey City Hall

Wikicommons app

The app has come far, in the past year or two. A year ago it usually crashed when I uploaded a picture, leaving me with no picture either in the phone or in the Website. That seems to have been fixed. The app didn't know when I walked to another place to snap a picture, so in the big city the "Nearby" map showed a hundred targets, none of them near me. So, the really buggy parts have been repaired. Currently, it is merely missing several features that would be pleasant. Few people are working on the app; it's somewhat a struggling orphan in the Wikiverse, so I expect new features will be added slowly, and cautiously to avoid making it buggy and unstable again.

As an old retired fellow, I walk or cycle near my home and farther places, and snap pictures. If it's an unphotographed Wikidata point, the Commons App shows it to me and I use the app to fill that point. Small thrill. I also carry my "real camera" which sometimes gets a better picture especially when zoom is needed. More sophisticated actions await my return home to my "real computer" with big screen and all, for which the Mediawiki software is designed.

The catalogue of photographed and unphotographed points is Commons:Wikidata which is the Wikiempire database of everything that might ever be mentioned in Wikipedia, and more. Many other databases are dumped into it, ahh, that is adapted and adopted into it. Thus, cycling through Brooklyn I see on the "Nearby" map public parks too small to have a tree, and cinemas that were demolished before even you and I were born. Some points are described only in German, and some have inaccurate locations. A few have inaccurate descriptions. I have speculated what source database produced these entries, but haven't sought an answer. So, no, nobody has adjudged these places as important enough to deserve a photograph; they are merely things for which a location is known. I fill in the blanks anyway, if the thing actually exists. It's not difficult, and who knows?

I was snapping Wikiphotos for years before the Commons app and WikiShootMe were invented to make maps. Indeed, I was doing that before I had a mobile phone. My Moto G7 Power is running Android 9 Build PPOS29.114-134-13 and Commons version 2.13~d950f7219.

For me, WikiShootMe is the way to hunt for nearby targets. It shows not only which places have Wikidata photos or don't (green dot or red) but also provides a tiny circle with direct link to the English Wikipedia page. There, I can easily see the pictures themselves, already selected by some previous editor. Often I think I can improve on the old picture, and that's where the Commons App comes in. It has nicer features for uploading a picture. And of course sometimes the previous editor made a bad choice of photo. Having been there and seen the place with my own eyes, I can better judge which photos best describe it.

The main advantage for me of uploading by the Commons app is that it suggests categories. Last year there was loose talk about making Wikidate replace categories, but the idea seems to have died and won't be revived for years if ever. So, the main way of editors finding illustrations for their articles is through the category tree.

However, the categories that Commons app suggests are often incomplete, irrelevant, vague, or simply wrong, which calls for edting them with hotcat and otherwise. Indeed, cat wrangling is the thing you will see most in my "contributions" record, since I categorize many pictures of places I am unlikely ever to see. Having adjusted categories, sometimes I find my pictures being used in ways I never imagined. You will also see in my record that most of my uploads are by Upload Wizard, which for me means with the big computer, using pictures from my real camera that has zoom and other features.

Alas, some of our best photographers remain uninterested in categorizing, so some of us wranglers look after them. Most uploaders don't consistently produce excellence and get such special treatment, so any of their uncategorized pictures that are excellent will never be noticed and never illustrate Wikipedia. Their effort is wasted.

One other trick, turn on the geotagging feature of your camera phone. Commons:Geocoding is a big help; it puts the photo on many maps including WikiShootMe. I often use geotags to identify miscategorized photos.

Photographers group

I wrote a little essay in Quora and decided to keep a copy here. I need to move a bunch of these things to a properly organized bunch of subpages. Oh, it’s not a problem. I have my patience, my fanatical drive to do something well despite obstacles. It’s just that my particular obsession is writing. In the late 1980s when consumer computers started connecting together in BBS networks, it gave me an opportunity to publish both my own words and those of others. No money in it, of course. When Al Gore invented the Internet, he put me out of business but eventually Wikipedia came along.

Ages ago in the 1950s, I had a Cub Scout pocket knife and a Cub Scout box camera. Highly educational toys. The knife taught me that a severed artery isn’t very painful but it produces blood in bright red spurts. Also, keep your knife sharp so it won’t slip, and carve away from your thumb, not towards. Occasionally the scar on my thumb reminds me. The camera, alas, taught me that photography was going to be difficult and somewhat expensive.

The toys that taught me what I could do were airplanes of paper and balsa wood, and the wires, batteries, lights and motors that taught me electricity. Science, and more precisely technology, became my early-teen pursuit. Also books. Mostly books about science and technology, but the written word was fascinating in itself.

So, after a brief formal education I spent 40 years in a technological career, and my hobbies came together into editing Wikipedia. However, I noticed that a great many articles could benefit from illustration, and very few did. Those that did, had a photo, usually poor, shot by a fellow editor. So, I borrowed a relative’s camera, and learned that any idiot could produce a picture as good as the ones already in Wikipedia. This is where my hobby of bicycling came in. Pedal out to a place, snap its picture, and edit into an article. There; now I’m not just biking for fun; I’m also on an urgent and sacred mission to document the world. Meanwhile my old love of maps brought me to geocoordinates and OpenStreetMaps.

In recent years we’ve got a different kind of Wikiphoto participant. These are not Wikipedians like me who want illustrations, but photographers who want to publish their output for the world to see. Being also a picture curator, I sometimes run across their pictures that can be used in an article. If the article already has a picture, the good one goes in. Drat, sometimes the poor one that must be removed is mine, but duty is duty. Fanaticism, y’know.

Let’s see, I ought to add a few links. First, my autobiography as a picture snapper and handler in Wikimedia Commons:

User:Jim.henderson - Wikimedia Commons

with a sloppily composed list of favorites among the ten thousand or so that I’ve uploaded. And, here’s the automated list of every picture uploaded, starting with the latest:

Uploads by Jim.henderson

Now a partial category tree of my photos, currently in process during the plague that’s keeping me from getting around much:

Category:Photos by Jim.henderson

Finally the club for Wikphotographers:

Commons:Commons Photographers User Group

I’m the tall, old one with the hat and white beard. They are mostly much better photographers than me, and the meetings tend to be about how good, experienced photographers can become even better. Not so much for us experienced and capable Wikipedians who are also ignorant and slow beginner photographers, nor about how good photographers can become good Wikkans.

Well, I’m not really finished babbling but have other things to do today; see you later, my friend.

Correspondence about buying a new camera

2021-12-19

So, a pretty quick check shows two models of Canon that use Bluetooth. Most of the information I was able to find quickly is about remote controlling your camera from your smartphone or tablet, but there are also bits about geotagging and file transfer.

Canon G7 is a pro camera and expensive; more than $2000 from any seller I could find. It has all three radios: GPS, WiFi and Bluetooth. Setup is fairly complex, requiring two different Canon apps but I guess I could get used to it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEBLA0PB-4U

Canon SX7300HS is much cheaper, $300-$400. It’s a superzoom point & shoot, much like my Nikon except somewhat smaller and the zoom is less zoomy, which is a point in its favor. It also has Bluetooth and, far as I tell, a similar way of using it with Canon apps. Apparently there are several alternative Canon apps and certainly many different Canon cameras. Finding information about them that is relevant to both our concerns will probably be tedious.

Youtube has many videos about doing a particular thing with a particular camera model when connected to its mobile apps. I have not seen much in the way of comparisons between different makes of camera, or even among different models of one manufacturer. It’s a much more fragmented market with far less comprehensive information than can easily be found about smartphones. So, I’ll continue searching when I get more time.

The main advantage I see of us both buying similar cameras of the same brand is information. We can study and share what we find in using them. That’s also why I’m still considering Panasonic: more than one of the local Wikipedia photographers use that brand.

It surprises me that the market for online information about cameras is so sparse compared to camera phones and tablets. There seems to be no industrious youtuber like Marques Brownlee to compare the latest features from different makers. User forums are scattered among those belonging to individual manufacturers, censored to that manufacturer’s advantage. Independent ones are those of photo magazines, and not much better on the whole. Quora has informative discussions on many topics, but the ones about photography are not good and the ones about cameras are even worse. Redit might perhaps have some good stuff; I should put more time into understanding that system.

2021-12-20

I've been looking at online reviews of cameras and discovered that the Panasonic Lumix G9 has most of the features I crave, but it's too big, too heavy, and too expensive. It's a high-end model, appropriate for pros. Many such cameras have a smaller, cheaper companion, and for the G9, Panny offers the GX9. Viewscreen is fold up / fold down instead of fully articulated. Naked it's about the size of a thin touristy point-and-shoot, and with a small "pancake" lens it would be moderately smaller than my old Nikon. It's normally sold with a nice zoom lens. Nice except that it's far too big to be handy for my frequently quick, casual, single-hand methods.

About $800 which is almost thrice what I paid for the old Nikon but I think with its RAW and other features it will give me more of the convenience and results I want. Of course, what I would really like is something that size with built-in GPS and Android so I can run Wikipedia apps on it, but apparently the camera companies don't want to offer those features except at ridiculously high prices.

2021-12-20

The mechanical features of a camera clearly cost money to make, and add weight and complexity, so the manufacturer must pick and choose to get a combination that users will want. So, that's all right by me.

The electronic and computer features, I don't understand why they aren't all put into every camera. They cost very little. Even the cheapest smartphone chip comes with a computer, three radio transceivers (phone, Wifi, Bluetooth) and another receiver (GPS) and the majority also have an FM broadcast receiver on the chip even though the majority of phone manufacturers disable it in order to save a couple bucks on the antenna. So, why do camera makers put a similar computer and pretty much the same radios only in cameras costing a thousand or more likely two? Users who don't want them need not look in the relevant menus. A camera already is a computer; it could easily have all the features of a cheap smartphone except for the phone feature.

Ah, well. I've pretty much decided on the Panasonic GX9. More connectivity than most in its price range. Must look to see whether I can save a bit of money by getting it without its stock zoom lens and just get a compact zoomer, giving up some optical quality for a lot more handiness.

Meanwhile I have been wrestling with Adobe Photoshop Elements, the cheap version of PS. Mostly, actually, just its Lightroom companion, the part that organizes. In younger days I soaked up new tech quickly; now my stiff old mind has gone impervious to new ideas. So far, I have managed to handle and edit one, count them, one of the photos I snapped in Brooklyn with you and I uploaded it to Wikimedia Commons.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Face_over_81_Willoughby_St_arch_2021_jeh.jpg

The Photoshop part of the operation was merely brightening the middle tones so the face would be more visible. It's very limited by my ignorance. Eventually I will hit the limits set by the lack of RAW data from the camera, and I'll definitely need a more advanced one.

Everything I did with this picture could have been done in one tenth the time and just as well with the simple tools that are included with Windoze, but I have hopes for the future.

2022 on EXIF

EXIF is a standard format for information about pictures.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exif Wow, that's a terribly hard article to read. I don't know whether it would be better to rewrite it, or to make a Simple English article that humans can read. Simple English Wikipedia has a few articles that mention it, but the one about Digital Cameras says the most:https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_camera

Anyway EXIF data can include a whole lot of things about the camera, its settings, the author, copyright info and the like. It can include geocoordinates: Latitude, longitude, altitude, and direction the camera is pointing. Smartphones with a camera normally make JPEG picture files with EXIF. When they know where they are, they can include the coordinates. Not when they are in a place where they cannot receive any signals. Some smartphone software can turn off EXIF writing, and some can turn off just parts of EXIF, especially geocoordinates. Far as I know, iPhones can't, or rather I can't find out how. Since some people don't want strangers to know where they are, external software can kill that information. Some sharing software such as Facebook always kill the coordinates; I don't know whether FB is among the ones that also kill the rest of EXIF. Anyway that looks like a good reason for me not to use iPhone or Facebook or a lot of other photo sharing services.

As far as I know, all Android phones can record EXIF with coords, and (nowadays) all come configured to record EXIF but not coords. I always turn on that feature so people can find out where I was standing to photograph a building or something, and turn it off on the rare occasion that I want my location to be secret.Other digital cameras also make EXIF. I don't know whether it is rare or commonplace to be able to suppress that. As for coordinates, most don't. That's because most separate cameras have dumb electronics. They don't have GPS and their inbuilt computer can only run software from the camera maker and it isn't versatile. My camera is one of the few that have a GPS receiver built in, and by default it records the coords in EXIF. It's only real GPS; not "assisted GPS" which also uses the cell phone network and WiFi. When it hasn't locked in the satellite signals, it doesn't record location. Sometimes I snap the same picture twice, with both the real camera and smartphone to assure having both a good picture and a good location. And rarely, chance has it that the camera phone got a better picture and the real camera got a more accurate location. Go figure.

Some manufacturers, instead of putting a smarter computer in the camera, omit the GPS receiver and instead use the smarter GPS receiver that's in your smartphone. The phone runs an app that connects to the camera by either WiFi or Bluetooth (each has advantages) and writes the phone's GPS location into the picture. Communication sometimes fails and even then it uses more power from both batteries, but usually it works. That's the real-time approach.There's another way, and Panasonic is especially fond of this. You can make the phone record its location periodically, not knowing what the camera is doing. After photography, the two little computers connect and the camera looks into the GPS record and puts those locations in the picture files. That way, the camera battery doesn't run down as much. Another variant doesn't require the camera to do anything different. You use a third computer, your laptop for example, to integrate the information. These versions require the clocks to be correct, among other things. My preferences are internal GPS first, real-time connection second, after the fact without third computer third, and last choice is to use the third computer.

If an uploaded picture file has coords in its EXIF, regardless of how that information got into EXIF, the Wikimedia Commons software will read it and show the picture on various Wikimedia maps. The Wiki software nowadays also has features to adjust to the correct location. Being fussy about this, I just about always adjust to get my feet out of the middle of the street or river or whatever, if that's not where I was.

Ziko Van Dijk on "Why is Wikimedia Commons so broken?"

Includes an explanation of the Wiki Cycle, about how content creates readers, who become editors, who make content, etc. English