Geotagging is a fairly-new, automatic and easy way to keep your digital photos organized. With a GPS enabled camera you can include GPS location information within the Exif data in your pictures. The problem however is that the cameras that have this functionality built in are still very expensive. Pictured on the right is Nikon’s D300 which is a GPS enabled camera. The last time I looked at the price for this camera it was about $1,700 which is a little outside my budget especially since the price doesn’t include any lenses for the camera.

No kidding around the D300 is a beautiful camera and I would love to have one but I still want to be able to eat more than a little bowl of rice every day next month so really I can’t afford one.

Lucky for me (and all the rest of the people on strict budgets) that there are alternative methods to automatically Geotag your digital pictures without burning up the money you’re going to spend on food for the next two months.

The i-gotU Travel Blog Master is the best deal at about $50 and it comes in two different models.

The water-resistant and non-water-resistant models are the same price so you might as well go for the extra security of having a more rugged model that comes with a cozy rubber-bumper case too.

The i-gotU Travel Blog Master is compatible with all digital cameras and camera-phones and can actually be used as a PC-GPS as well. It comes with the software that helps you easily create a 3D photo-journey in Google Earth and in Google Maps.

If you’re wondering about accuracy you can be assured this will be as accurate as any other device on the market. It comes with the widely popular SiRF III Chipset that is used in many GPS systems.

Sony says that the GPS-CS1KA GPS Image tracker is compatible with virtually any digital still camera and camcorder. Record the time, date and location to each shot you take. You can use with any of camera since now Picture Motion Browser software is included in GPS-CS1KA. Once the images and data are on your PC, the supplied image tracker software synchronizes the photos with latitude, longitude and time reading from the GPS-CS1KA unit. Activate the Picture Motion Browser software are your photos will pop up next to push pins on Google Maps or Google Earth by the actual location where you shot the picture.

But wait just a second! This is selling for $150 which is about $100 more than the i-gotU model that does exactly the same thing.

Alright – it does have a pretty cool design and also the hook for a carabiner (those ever so popular clips that are used for hiking and now everything else too) which makes it something you can just clip to your backpack and forget about until the journey is over. Your call on whether it’s worth the extra $100 though.

The GiSTEQ PhotoTrackr Lite is also a great choice – it’s reasonable priced at about $100 and has all the features you’d expect from a device like this.

They claim that “the most exciting feature of all is that you can upload your photos to flickr online” which you can do with any other picture too! That particular feature is not really unique to any device and if you’ve geotagged your pictures with any other device flickr will treat them the same when you’ve uploaded them.

With a cool design and also the clip for the carabiner you’d think it’d be worth as much as the Sony model. I’m guessing the extra $50 on the Sony is the price you pay for the little painted on Sony logo.

There’s been mention that this GPS device doesn’t live up to the advertised 22+ hours of normal battery usage time but that would be totally dependent on where the device is being used. If it’s always searching for satellites it’ll use up the battery a lot faster than if it has constant locks on them. Even so 10 hours on a rechargeable Li-ion battery would suffice for most users.

So there it all is! Geotagging your digital pictures automatically, cheaply, and easily!