Cell phone picture question

[undercoverbrother]

If I take a picture on my cell phone where there is no service and later I come into an area with cell service, what is the GPS co-ordinates that will be assigned to the picture.

Will it be the ones from where I took the picture or will it be from where I came back into service?

[pylon]

This doesn't sound the least bit sketchy.

[opendoor]

Originally Posted by undercoverbrother

If I take a picture on my cell phone where there is no service and later I come into an area with cell service, what is the GPS co-ordinates that will be assigned to the picture.

Will it be the ones from where I took the picture or will it be from where I came back into service?

I'm not positive, but I believe most phones would use the GPS to assign the location even without any cell reception.

I suppose you could test it by taking your SIM out and taking a picture and see if it still geotags the photo.

[MrMastodonFarm]

Originally Posted by undercoverbrother

If I take a picture on my cell phone where there is no service and later I come into an area with cell service, what is the GPS co-ordinates that will be assigned to the picture.

Will it be the ones from where I took the picture or will it be from where I came back into service?

If the location was unknown when you took the picture, then it will always be unknown.

[GoinAllTheWay]

Do you keep your GPS on all the time? I rarely do but despite that, any picture I take seems to have GPS Lat & Long. All of them expect the ones I took in St. Maarten and the US so I wonder if it's approximating your position based on your cellular location.

**edit**

That's weird, GPS location shows up on all photo's in Calgary but no where else. How does that work? I had my cell phone on in both the US and St. Maarten, just the data connection turned off. Maybe it's based on that?

[Rathji]

If your Data (Wifi or Celluar) and GPS are off, then you don't have any location data for the application to tag onto the photo. You need either one or the other, or both.

If your GPS is on, it just increases the accuracy of the location compared to cell phone and wifi triangulation techniques.

[ken0042]

I checked out some of my camping pictures from this weekend. Using only GPS after being out of cell range for over a day they still show the location with considerable accuracy.

This was on an iPhone, but I would think most GPS capable phones would be similar.

[Jacks]

I suggest you move the body just to be safe.

[photon]

It can take a phone a while for it to get a fix without data access, sometimes a few minutes or more if the ephemeris data isn't up to date.

If your phone has no location at all when the pictures are taken (GPS is turned off, or hasn't got a fix yet) I doubt it will go back to the pictures after the fact and update the location. So either the pictures will have the last known location or no location at all (I'd say no location, putting in an old location into the photos could be more annoying than no location).