Tips – Page 6 – Life In Limbo

Instagram Tips: How to Geotag a Picture to Your Photo Map After You’re No Longer at a Location

May 14, 2014

One of my favourite things about Instagram is the Photo Map feature. I only really started travelling last summer on my trip around Europe, but since that time I’ve been lucky enough to visit more places than I could have imagined when I set off on that first trip. Of course I remember and appreciate those experiences in ways that have nothing to do with social media, but I won’t deny that it’s cool and rewarding to have a visual representation of my adventures through my Photo Map. Adding a location to your pictures is also a cool way for people interested in a specific place to see your photos – by clicking a location you can see a whole collection of photos tagged from there, for example the Eiffel tower or Angor Wat temple!

One of the problems I’ve run into a few times is adding the location of a photo after I’m no longer in the area I was when it was taken. Sure, it’s called Instagram, but when I’m somewhere truly beautiful I much prefer to take a few photos then just enjoy my time there and post photos online when I have downtime, like back at the hostel or when I’m home. But when you’re no longer at the location you were when you took the photo, sometimes you can’t find the right location to properly add the photo to your map. Yes, I realize there are real, actual problems in the world and this is very much not one of them, but there’s a simple fix so I thought I’d share it in case anyone is running into this issue as well. Unfortunately, if you’ve already posted your photo there’s no way to go back and change the location short of deleting and re-posting.

First, if you use an iPhone to take photos, make sure your camera has Location Services turned on: Settings > Privacy > Location Services > Camera. If you use VSCOCam to edit your photos, make sure location data is enabled for import and export: Settings > Privacy. Turning these settings on will mean that you probably won’t encounter this problem in the future.

If you take photos on your camera, they’ll usually have location data, but that data might be stripped from the photo if you email it to yourself, like I do. Alternatively, if you use another photo editing app, it might strip the location data when you export your photo, regardless of the device you used to take it.

Here’s how this works on Instagram, in my experience. If your photo has embedded location data, Instagram will suggest places “nearby” based on that data, regardless of your actual physical location. For example, if I’m in Korea but I have a photo with location data saying the photo was taken in Toronto, Instagram will suggest possible locations in Toronto where I might have been when I took it. If your photo does not have embedded location data, Instagram will suggest places nearby based on your actual physical location. Meaning that if I’m in Korea trying to post a picture I took while I was in Toronto but that doesn’t have any embedded location data, Instagram will suggest places within a few miles of where me and my phone are currently standing, in Korea.

As an example, the above photo was taken while I was sitting in my apartment in Korea. It shows location search results based on the location data embedded into the photo I was posting to Instagram, which was taken at Shibuya crossing in Tokyo.

Enter Koredoko! This awesome, free app lets you geotag photos that don’t have any embedded location data.

Click the “+” symbol in the bottom right corner and click through to Settings > Extention. Make sure the “Extention” and “Show Ads” options are both turned on.
Click the symbol with three stacked horizontal lines in the bottom left corner to access your camera roll.
Choose a picture that you want to add location data to, then simply drag and drop it to the location on the map where you were when you took it. You might have to do some zooming in and re-adjusting to get it to the right approximate location but overall this is a very straightforward process.
Click the blue “i” on the right hand side of the location data box.
Then click the export button at the top right of the information box that will appear. See the photo above for what it should look like.
Choose “Save with Metadata” from the pop-up menu.

From there, adding the photo to your Photo Map on Instagram should be easy. Just make sure the “Add to Photo Map” option is turned on, then choose “Name This Location” and search for whichever location your little heart desires. When you share the photo, it’ll show up on your map.

Like I said, not an overly important problem by any means, but hey – if it helps anyone at all, I’m happy to share what I’ve learned. I thought my last Instagram Tips post on hashtagging was also a bit trivial, but I’ve gotten some feedback from people who were really grateful for the information, which makes it all worthwhile for me. I hope this can help you too!

I learned most of what I know on this subject through this awesome article on Fatemeh Fahkraie’s website. She does a great job of explaining the concept and introducing the app as well as another app option if Koredoko doesn’t work for you. She’s also updated the article a few times as new information has come up, so it’s definitely worth a look if you’re still trying to figure this out for yourself. In her post, she says that you should turn Instagram Location Services off in your iPhone settings in order to force the app to use the photo’s metadata, but in my experience the location data “trumps” your physical location. If it doesn’t work for you though, try the fix she outlines.

Happy ‘gramming! You can follow me on Instagram @lifeinlimboblog.

How To Use Social Media More Effectively

April 22, 2014

On today’s episode of Guinea Pigging Green, we’re talking about social media. Now, I totally love Instagram and Twitter – I think that they’re awesome tools for sharing inspiration and beauty. Unfortunately, they also have a dark side if you’re not careful about how you use them. For instance, I’ll readily admit to checking for “likes” compulsively and feeling strangely competitive towards those with more followers than me.

So that’s why today’s episode is all about using social media more effectively, in ways that will make you feel good and that take advantage of the positive aspects of these platforms. Our jumping-off point for this episode was a great article from Relevant Magazine: 5 Questions to Ask Before Posting to Social Media. It really resonated with me and since then I’ve been sharing its ideas in conversations and trying to consciously keep them in mind whenever I’m posting content.

In the episode, we talk about finding intrinsic motivations (ie. finding enjoyment in the act itself) for using social media rather than extrinsic ones (ie. enjoying the act because you want the reward that will follow). Personally I find it rewarding and (intrinsically) motivating to seek out beauty in my everyday life, to practice my photography and see slow-but-steady improvement, to find a community of like-minded people and to curate a collection of photos that are special and beautiful to me. I try to focus on these motivations every time I start to fall into a downward spiral of comparison or greed.

I think that it’s possible for these platforms to be a positive part of our lives, but I think it’s important for us to use them in a healthier and more conscious way. You can find the episode, which I think is full of food for thought, on our blog or by subscribing to us on iTunes.

Instagram Tips: How To Fix an Instagram Hashtag When a Photo Doesn’t Show Up in Search Results

March 31, 2014

UPDATE SEPTEMBER 2016:

Hi everyone! I’m sorry you’ve found yourself here on this page, and that your Instagram hashtags aren’t working – I know how annoying that is. The method I describe in the post below is no longer working for several users. Two things to know:

If you are using a third-party app to post photos, such as Adobe Lightroom or Dropbox, that seems to cause the hashtags to not work.
This seems to affect brand-new accounts more than established ones.

Unfortunately, I’m not an Instagram expert and I am not currently (in September 2016) experiencing this issue so I do not yet have the solution. I would hypothesize that Instagram may want to discourage overuse of hashtags, especially on new accounts, so as to limit “spam” accounts, but I’m not sure. Some people in the comments below have had luck submitting a help ticket to Instagram. Actually, there is lots of activity in the comments section of this post that I hope will help someone out. I will update the post if I learn more.

I recently started a daily photography challenge loosely based on the project #100HappyDays. I wanted to create my own hashtag in order to keep my photos grouped together and organized for me personally, so I chose one that nobody else had used yet, #stephlovestoday. I happily began tagging my photos with it and they would show up in the search results for that tag without a problem.

Then I noticed that one of my Instagram photos wasn’t showing up in the search results for that hashtag. I thought this was odd, since I’d never had any problems before. I did a bit of a Google search and finally found the information I was looking for, buried in the replies to a Yahoo Answers post. I’m sharing it here in the hopes that I can be helpful to someone who might be encountering the same problem I was!

Here’s what it comes down to: there are a few broken hashtags on Instagram. When you tag using those tags, they ruin it for all their hashtag friends and none of the other tags you use on that photo will show up in their respective search results.

I don’t have a definitive list of all the broken hashtags, so you’ll have to do a bit of trial-and-error if you’re encountering this problem. But here are a few to watch out for (in my experience):

#photography
#instagram
#love

These are all popular hashtags, so I think they all work at least sometimes, but if you’re encountering an issue with one of your photos not showing up for another tag, chances are one of these tags are causing an issue.

I’ll show you an example. Here’s a photo I took for my photography project. I tagged it with a few hashtags.

Unfortunately, the search results for my personal tag don’t show this photo, despite it being tagged!

How annoying. Luckily, I put all my hashtags into a comment. If you tagged your photo in the caption and not a comment, you’ll have to delete and re-post your photo for this fix to work.

Here’s how to fix it.

Locate the broken hashtag. Again, this is where trial-and-error might come into play, but for me it was definitely the #photography hashtag.

Click “Comment” underneath your photo and it’ll take you to the screen above. Swipe to the left, and then click the red trashcan to delete the comment.

Once you’ve identified the problem, you can tag to your heart’s content!

And happily, your photo will now appear in the search results for all the hashtags you used, including of course your own personal tag.

I hope this was helpful! If you have had a similar problem, share your experience in the comments.

You can follow me on Instagram @lifeinlimboblog.

How I Use My Bullet Journal

March 26, 2014

I love to make lists and write things down to keep my thoughts (and life) organized, and over the years I’ve had many different systems for doing so. I had a brief love affair with the Filofax system, but it just wasn’t flexible enough for me. At one point I just wrote things down on a yellow pad of paper, but the lack of organization and potential for sheets to be ripped out or lost ended up stressing me out, so that was short lived. For a couple years now, my go-to has been a simple lined notebook. I’ve used notebooks made by Clairefontaine and Moleskine and I love both. My favourite size is the Moleskine Large size, 8.25 x 5”.

Then recently I hit upon a new system for organizing things within the notebook itself: bullet journaling! It’s actually a very simple system, but something about the guidelines it sets out has helped me to feel much more organized and in control of all the information I want to keep track of on a daily basis.

First of all, the system uses an index and numbered pages. I haven’t been too consistent about writing down what pages my lists are on and then looking them up, but the times that I remember to do so, I’ve saved lots of time not flipping around from one list to another trying to remember where I wrote what.

It also has a monthly calendar and to-do list at the beginning of each month, followed by pages for daily lists. In the monthly calendar I usually just write down the biggest event that day (I have another agenda that I use for keeping track of appointments), more as a memory aid than anything else. I love the monthly to-do list and use it all the time. The items on the monthly to-do list end up getting transferred to my daily to-do lists and nothing is forgotten. Sometimes, when I’m stressed out, my daily to-do list is short and includes easy items like “shower” (see below) so that I feel better about my productivity. It works!

The daily lists are great, because the bullet journal symbol system makes it easy to incorporate all different kinds of information. The black dot is for ideas & inspiration and might include a book title I heard about that day or a possible birthday gift for a friend. The circle is for events, so this can act as a dayplanner as well. And the square is for to-do list items, perfect for being checked off once they’re accomplished.

And then, of course, are all the random lists. I constantly have a “catch-all” list on the go for writing down all kinds of “black dot” items (ideas & inspiration), some of which end up being turned into to-do list items. Every few days, as the list fills up, I’ll go back and highlight the ones that I haven’t yet taken action on (for example: looked up, researched, figured out, added to my GoodReads, etc) just so they don’t all blur together. Other examples of lists in my most recent bullet journal include: groceries, Korean bucket list, observations, blog post ideas.

And it’s really as simple as that. It’s not necessarily ground-breaking, but for me, even just the idea of having different symbols for different types of information was tremendously helpful. I’m still tweaking the system to work for me and coming up with new symbols to indicate different things, but so far I love this simple method. Check out the bullet journal website & video to learn more. Any organization methods you’d like to share? I’d love to hear them! I’m endlessly fascinated by office supplies and productivity tips.