As a photographer you have probably come across the term geotagging before now, a way to describe the location a photo was taken in metadata embedded within an image file. This geo tagging can be done in camera (some cameras contain a GPS), with a companion device (a geotagger) that tracks your location as you take photos and synchronises later, or manually with software (just like when you embed titles, descriptions and keywords).
From a stock photography point of view, embedding the location coordinates in this way seems to have had little uptake, even though the technology has been around for some time. There are several reasons for this: