Maperture is a nifty little plugin for Aperture that lets you geotag photos in your library. We've covered quite a few different geotagging apps for the Mac, but this is the first one that works so well with Aperture as a plugin.

Basically, Maperture integrates an interface to Google Maps which allows you to easily place your pictures on a map, saving the location information as metadata in the photos. Since it's a front end for Google Maps, you get its built-in features like the satellite and hybrid views, etc. In addition, Maperture will automatically place images already containing location information on the map for you. Now the only problem is remembering exactly where you were when you took the picture!

Maperture is a free download from Übermind and requires Aperture 2.

[via Macworld]

Two of my preferred Mac-friendly cloud services have now made the jump to actually accepting money from subscribers, which is a good thing (really, it is!). TUAW favorite Evernote has moved from private to public beta, and Techsmith video hosting site Screencast.com is now at 1.0 release status. Both services are now offering trial/free plans alongside their premium plans for paid subscribers.

The Screencast.com site is already integrated with the free Jing Project capture tool for Mac and the pro-level (and, at least for the moment, Windows-only) Camtasia Studio app; you can also upload screencasts that you create with almost any tool you like (including ADA multi-winner Screenflow) in a variety of formats for hosting on the service. Selecting which of your screencasts to share and which to password-protect is very easy, and the service automatically sets up RSS and iTunes feeds for the folders you choose to make public.The 60-day trial account includes 200 MB of storage and a 1GB transfer limit; paid plans start at $6.95 a month.

Evernote's private beta grew to include over 125,000 users (ahem), and the new public beta includes an option for a $5/month premium user plan that increases your monthly transfer quota/new note cap from 40 MB to 500 megabytes and gives you SSL for all data, priority access to the text-recognition queues and tier 1 customer support. Plus you get a snazzy t-shirt while supplies last (pink elephants on parade!). The web interface to Evernote has also gotten a facelift, with full drag-and-drop support and an improved clipper feature. Can't say yet if they've fixed the session timeout issue that ate a long note my wife was writing last night, but I surely hope so.

In a conversation a couple of weeks back, Evernote CEO Phil Libin shared some future directions for the product with us as well as a couple of tips from his personal use of Evernote.

First, what many are waiting for will be coming very soon: a native iPhone client for Evernote (shipping shortly after the App Store opens), including one-button publishing to Evernote and location tagging for every item you create from your phone, like a trail of breadcrumbs leading you back to that favorite restaurant or bargain spot. (Phil's tip: whenever he parks his car at the airport, he takes a picture of the parking spot and sends it to Evernote to help jog his jetlagged brain.)

Second, the upcoming platform-wide features for Evernote will soon include more granular controls on publishing and sharing, a revamped Windows client, Evernote for Blackberry, and audio notes. (Phil's tip: he uses Evernote notebooks to share collections of photos or screenshots, like this accidental poetry from CNN rundown.) Later this summer we should expect to see the first public release of the Evernote API, which will permit third-party devs to add features to the service (personally I'd love to have a business card postprocessor tool, which Libin sees as a good 3rd party opportunity).

Other future features are yet to be publicly disclosed, but Libin hinted that the image-processing power of Evernote's servers may be bent to teasing out specific features of photographs. Faces? Product barcodes? Geotagged landscapes? Can't wait to find out. Meanwhile, the free Mac version of Evernote (read Brett's original review here) is downloadable at evernote.com.

We've previously covered quite a few different applications to geocode your photos. Geocoding or geotagging is the process of adding location information (latitude and longitude) to the EXIF metadata of your photos, so you can see where they were taken. RapidoMap is one of the newest of these tools and looks to have a couple of particularly nice features. The application integrates a browser for Yahoo Maps which is how you actually locate your photos on the globe. It has an iLife media browser that makes it easy to get your photos in, and a built-in Flickr uploader.

Best of all, RapidoMap is a free download from app4mac (points off to them, however, for using an installer package).

[via Macworld]

We have posted about several differing geocoding solutions for the Mac. All of these programs allow you to embed location information in the EXIF data of your photographs, thus specifying where the photo was taken as well as the time, date, etc. The newest entry into the Mac geocoding sweepstakes is HoudaGeo, which has just been released as a public beta. Like some of the others, it allows you to tag your photos either by importing tracking data from a GPS device (syncing using the time stamps) or by using an interface with Google Maps. Once the photos have been tagged you can export them to Google Earth with a single click:



HoudaGeo is a free download while it's in beta but will eventually be shareware.

We've previously mentioned a couple of ways to do Mac-based geocoding-that is, applying location information to the EXIF meta data of your photos. Now comes the latest entry in the geocoding sweepstakes: Geophoto from Ovolab. Geophoto presents you with a Google Earth like interface that you can zoom in/out and drop your photos on the appropriate spot from the Finder, iPhoto, Aperture, etc.. In addition, you can subscribe to iPhoto Photocasts or Flickr geocoded photosets. Unfortunately, although you can search for particular locations by name, political boundaries (countries, cities, etc.) do not appear on the map, nor does the zoom go down to the street level, so putting a photo in exactly the right spot is difficult. (Ovolab says they are working on adding street-level detail in the future.)

This is a very slick application, but that slickness comes at a rather steep price: $49.95. A demo (limited to 50 photos) is available for download. I think there is a lot of promise here, but this is a version 1.0 application and it shows.

[Via MacMinute]