Wow, geotagging worked from my home network!

[ThatAdamGuy]

I set my eye-fi card up this evening on my home computer and the software quickly and effectively noted the presence of my home network.

What amazed and pleased me, though, was that my photos taken at home have been geotagged to an accuracy within one block! And I can't imagine that Skyhook decided to identify my personal wifi (and I can tell you that my roomie sure didn't submit the MAC address and such).

One thing I've thought of is that I'm in Mountain View, where we have wireless set up for the city by Google. But this Google wireless was not identified in the eye-fi manager, so I can't imagine it was being used for triangulation.

Any guesses how eye-fi magically geotagged my photos?

[hyachts]

Skyhook does map personal AP's - that's the only way it gets the coverage it does. They log the MAC address and location of every AP they can "see" when they're driving an area. According to Skyhook's coverage map, Mountain View is well covered. Also, just because a wireless network doesn't show up in a wireless connection manager like Eye-Fi's or your computers doesn't mean it can't be seen for geotagging purposes. Generally wifi is only good for a few hundred feet for connecting purposes, but the "beacon" that includes the MAC can usually be seen much farther away. Wireless configuration utilities will generally only report networks that you could successfully connect to (there's some threshold value for signal strength). If you want to see all the networks that are visible for geotagging purposes, use a utility like Netstumbler (keep in mind that the Eye-Fi card will probably not see as many networks as your computer does, though).

[ThatAdamGuy]

Ah, interesting! Thanks much for clue'ing me in!