locate your photos - locr goes beta

www.locr.com manages and arranges photos according to the place they were taken, precise right down to the street

Brunswick, January 29th, 2007 – The Brunswick startup locr enters the beta phase today: after logging onto www.locr.com, hobby photographers and professional users alike can archive pictures according to geographical data at no charge and exchange them with one another. Unique: locr automatically assigns to the pictures the postal address of the place where they were taken

The photo-sharing site locr is a platform to go online for which geotagging is not just one function among many, but is clearly the major feature. When you use locr, you will not only be able to sort and arrange photos without using long-winded descriptions or complicated time codes, but will also get to know the world through the cameras of other users. In the standard view, locr shows the photo itself, plus the place it was taken on Google Maps in map, aerial, and satellite shots, an overview of other photos from the proximity of the place it was taken which have been uploaded onto the site, and the postal address, key words, and comments. If you want to know more about the place where the photo was taken, just have at look at the Wikipedia articles which are also automatically assigned to the picture. Users can upload their pictures as they wish into either a public viewing area or into a protected private section.

The key to simple archiving and generation of this plethora of additional information is the geotag – the coordinates of the place where the photo was shot are attached to the digital photo.

locr offers not only the platform for archiving and sharing geoindexed photos; the specialists from Brunswick are also working on a series of tools which will label photo files, automatically or semi-automatically, with geotags. Right on time for the beta phase start, users can not only geotag online, they can also geotag with the free locr PC client for Windows XP. The software attaches a geotag to photos which are shot with a camera that is not capable of geotagging. If the photographer had an external GPS data logger running while he was shooting his pictures, the software automatically adds the coordinates of the place of the shot to the EXIF header of the picture file.

If the photographer does not have a GPS data logger available, the geoindexing can also be done semi-automatically. The software displays a map from Google Maps, and the user marks the place of the shot on this map by a mouse click. locr has succeeded in making this editing step significantly more comfortable than when other applications are used. The advantage over comparable Web-based tools: the user edits the file right on his computer and ends up with a geoindexed picture file which can be used any way he wants.

For online geotagging the photo is uploaded to locr and the place where it was taken is marked on Google Maps.

locr is focusing primarily on hobby and professional photographers as well as the users of camera-equipped cell phones as the target group. And interesting B2B applications, in logistics or the real estate field, for example, are also envisioned for the future.

Malte Schloen, co-founder and general manager of locr GmbH declares enthusiastically: “Who hasn’t had the problem before? There are thousands of photos taken with a digital camera over the last few years stored helter-skelter on the PC at home. Our goal is to put an end to this picture chaos and to revolutionize the presentation and archiving of photos using automatically generated location information.”

All of the locr services will be available free of charge during the beta phase.

Log onto www.locr.com for additional information.

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