Have you ever looked back at a picture you’ve taken in your phone, from some long lost forest drive, of your family in front of a stunning, perfect waterfall? And you’d love to visit it again, but you can’t remember how you got there? If this happens to you, a scant $0.99 investment in SeeSaw’s new Map Camera may be a smart one. Map Camera accesses metadata – which is a ton of information that is embedded in every image you take on your iPhone or DSLR – and decodes it so you can see where that picture was taken, and find out how to get back there again.
The app works with the metadata in your image, which includes GPS coordinates, in an attempt to help you better understand photos you’ve taken. The app works simply, either snap a picture, and the app adds an address, date, and time to your pictures so you can access them later. You can also select filters to add to the picture, from a list of six, and change the font of the text on the image, as well as the address listed. After doing this, you can choose to change your map style, either a normal map, a satellite image of your address, or a hybrid of the two.
At this point, you can save this picture to an image roll, to be accessed either later when you’re trying to look back and figure out where you’ve been and how to get back, or right away, so you can transfer the address to your maps app and get directions back to where your photo was taken. If you choose, you can look at the pictures in the app’s archive, which is helpfully sorted by filter type, to find an image that you’ve saved in the past. Opening one of these images displays it larger, of course, but you can also bring up the map that you saved when you edited the picture, and some of the photo information, such as your shutter speed, F-Stop, even whether or not the flash was on when the picture was taken. All of this information can be saved together with your image for easy sending to friends and family, even sharing on Facebook!
This app is perfect for the wanderer who hopes to return to the places they’ve been, but may not remember how to get to. The one addition this app would need would be the addition of a feature that would take the location information stored in the image and open it in a user’s Maps app, ready for turn-by-turn directions back to where the picture was taken originally. However, the ability to store away the locations of your most special memories is well worth the $0.99 that SeeSaw’s Map Camera charges it’s users.
There are apps similar to this one in the App Store, but Map Camera is cheaper and more powerful. Where some apps may need users to take their images and add filters themselves in another app, Map Camera combines these features to make the process easier for its users. Whether it’s for the ability to share socially with friends around the globe the exact locations a user visits on a vacation, or just for a user to look back and see where they’ve been, and go back there again, Map Camera can help.