Pic-A-Spot is an app for smart phones that attaches the following information to a photo and sends it to a user as an attachment:

• Latitude and longitude of a photo;
• Street location where available;
• Compass reading of the phone (Note, a phone held in portrait setting will record the direction of photo); and,
• Date and time the photo was taken.

In addition, the app allows the user to type in additional information that the user may want to assign to the photo. The information is presented in a format that easily allows for creation of a database. Pic-A-Spot is also able to retrieve locational information and date/time etc from your existing photographs as long as they contain that information.

Options for Transmitting the Photo:

The user is provided the following three options to use the photo:

• Email the photo from the smartphone;
• Upload the photo to the user’s Facebook account; and,
• Save the phone in an image gallery for a later use (let’s say you don’t want to email it right away or you have a poor signal).

Suggested Applications:

Pic-A-Spot was developed to help people identify where the photos were taken. So, you will like this App, if you are:

• An enviro-volunteer (or a professional) that needs photographs with location and description information;
• Like us and want to remember where you took that photo on the family vacation;
• Someone with a need for crowd-sourcing information that needs photographs with location and description information;
• That conscientious person that wants to send a photo to your local government to show them what needs to be fixed and where;
• A journalist or an aid worker and want to record the locational information of a project site;
• A fisherman that likes to fish and wants to remember a favorite fishing spot;
• Someone that wants to prove to friends that you really did climb to the top of that mountain! We recommend you post it on our facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/pages/Pic-a-Spot/308280149210755); and
• And many, many more . . . If you use it for a use not mentioned above, tell us!

Caveats:

The reported information is dependent of the phone settings and the signal strength:

• The direction recorded is the compass reading of a phone. You can record the direction of your photo if you shoot the photo with your camera held in portrait mode. The compass should only be used for basic navigation assistance and should not be solely relied upon to determine precise locations, proximity, distance, or direction; and
• The speed and accuracy of the GPS signal is limited by the strength of the signal received by the phone, and whether the cell phone uses satellite or cell tower triangulation to determine location. You may need to wait before a GPS signal is acquired by your phone.