Background: GNSS and Geocoding

GNSS is an acronym for "Global Navigation Satellite System". Some years ago, GNSS was practically equivalent to GPS, the first commonly available and still most important GNSS. Current operational GNSS are

• GPS (USA)
• Galileo (EU)
• GLONASS (Russia)
• Beidou (China)

These systems are each based on a satellite network. Radio signals from these satellites can be used by receiving devices to calculate their exact position on the earth surface or in air space.
The accuracy currently available from the GPS system on non-military devices is about 1 - 5 meters.
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Geographic coordinates (formerly known as "GPS coordinates") are a reference system for uniquely identifying any place on our planet.

The coordinate system defines degrees of latitude and longitude covering the whole surface of the earth:

• 180 degrees of latitude, beginning with 0 degrees on the equator, and ranging up to 90 degrees on the north pole (90°N) and 90 degrees on the south pole (90°S).
• 360 degrees of longitude, beginning with the zero meriadian, which extends from the north pole to the south pole and runs through the observatory of Greenwich (near London). Values range from 180°W to 180°E.

To get precise values, degrees are subdivided into minutes and seconds:

• One degree is about 111 km or 60 nautical miles on a meridian.
• One minute is 1/60th of a degree, which is 1.852 m or 1 nautical mile on a meridian.
• One second is 1/60th of a minute, which is about 31 m on a meridian.

Image files can be provided with information about the place where the photo was shot.

A photo can usually be assigned a unique location, as every place on our planet can be uniquely described by geographical coordinates (latitude and longitude). With photos "knowing" their coordinates, there is a fascinating range of new options:

• You can arrange images by their location.
  The Panorado 5.0 image finder is able to retrieve images according to their distance form a specified location.
• Image locations can be displayed on a (digital) map or satellite image.
  Panorado 5.0 provides a button for visualizing the positions of your photos on an interactive OpenStreetMap page.

Today's GNSS receivers are small, cheap mass products. They are built into virtually all smartphones and most digital cameras. Thus, each picture's geo coordinates can be stored automatically into the image file.

If these coordinates are missing or need to be corrected for any reason, you can use the Panorado 5.0 image properties tool to insert them (either manually, or from the Windows clipboard) directly into an image file.

The EXIF standard provides a format for storing geo coordinates within JPEG image files.