The development team at faces.com has released the first set of Geo-Tag functionality.  A Geo-Tag is like a normal tag, but it contains the latitude, longitude and, in some cases, the altitude of something - in this case, a Photo.  You can see these Geo-Tags appearing in some of the faces.com pages, most notably in the Slideshow display page.

Currently, there is only one way for faces.com users to save location information for a photo as a Geo-Tag.   The process requires the following:

- The original photo must be in a JPEG format

- The photo must have GPS co-ordinates saved in the EXIF information of the photo.

If you are a faces.com user, and have photos like this, upload them now, and Geo-Tags will be created for you, automatically.  You can then follow the links to view your photos in Google Earth and Google Maps, right where you took them.

If your photos don't have this information (sadly, most don't), then stay tuned because the faces.com development team is working on ways you can Geo-Tag any photo.

Some advanced digital cameras have GPS receivers built into them, and will automatically save the location when the photo is taken.  If you do not have a camera of this type, there are various software packages available which will do this for you, either as a manual input of the co-ordinates, or by importing information from another GPS device.

This is just the beginning of the exciting changes around Geographical tagging, coming soon to the faces.com website.

Developers : You can now write applications to utilize the faces.com API for Geo-Tagging.  See the details at http://www.faces.com/Edit/API/GettingStarted.aspx