Geo tags and MMS is a no-no
Maybe this information is not new to you, but I was quite surprised to learn it is impossible to send a geo tagged image using MMS.
What prompted me to look into geo tags and MMS was an inquiry from a client this week. The client uses our messaging gateway and they have been looking into developing a service featuring upload of geo tagged images by MMS. User of the service would send in images and these would all be shown on a map - something that would be used in conjunction with a lot of other stuff going on.
The client had been doing some initial tests and when uploaded images turned up without geo tags, the client contacted us inquiring how our gateway processed the images?
I had a quick look-see at the gateway code, which revealed that the gateway basically does not process data embedded within images. Suspecting the missing geo tags had something to do with MMS itself, I decided to into the matter some more. Luckily, the S60 Ambassadors program has recently issued me with a Nokia N82 loaner unit (thank you!) and I did some tests using that. The recent v20.0.062 firmware bestows excellent geo tagging capabilities upon the N82 - see further down.
I enabled geo tagging on the N82 and shot the image shown at the top of this post. I then uploaded the image to my flickr account and had a look at the EXIF data embeded in the image. To the left is shown the location data (geo tag) part of the EXIF data. As you can see the image contains both position latitude and longitude.
Next, I added the image to a MMS message and as you are probably aware, this means the image is processed. For one thing large images are scaled to 640 x 480 pixels -a size suitable for MMS, but apparently a lot of other processing goes on. I discovered this when I took the MMS image (you can extract multi media objects from MMS messages) and uploaded that to flickr too. Click on the image below and inspect the details on the flickr page. As you will see, the flickr page has no link to "more properties", meaning the image has no EXIF data.
No EXIF data in MMS images? That is a rather limiting feature, don't you think? I realize MMS is probably an age-old technology (the way these things works), but that absolutely all meta information is stripped from the image still seems rather odd in this day and age. I mean, one could imagine embedding all sorts of information in images?
By the way - if you own a N82 and have not yet updated to the latest v20.0.062 firmware, you really ought to. Here is why:
- Automagic display rotation has been improved - it is now more sensitive.
- Flash Lite 3 and WRT support in browser. View flash content - like YouTube videos - right in the browser.
- Location tagging (geo tags) support. Can be configured to automatically tag images and it works fast and like a charm.
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