Your iPhone apps can track your location. You already know that, but maybe you tell yourself that that weather app just uses your current location to give you an accurate forecast, or that your bike-routing and tracking app is just keeping a count of miles and calories.

In reality, any one of these apps may be taking that location data and selling it. One way to handle this is to keep up to date with the privacy policies of any location-aware apps you use, but that’s too much work for most of us. Instead, why not just deny them access to your location? On iOS, that’s easy, and it works.

Apart from letting you quickly edit and share photos (and always sitting, ready to go, in your pocket), the iPhone camera has one other great feature: It geotags every photo and video you shoot with the place you captured the imagery. You might not care about that now, but in the future when you wonder, “Where did I take that naked self-portrait?” or decide to take a look at your old vacation snaps, you’ll love geotagging.

Hell, half the time I use a map to find a photo — I can usually remember where I was better than when I was.

Lack of geotagging is perhaps the main reason I don’t take my regular camera out as often as I’d like, so I decided to do something about that. I’m using a combination of the iOS GeoTagr app on iPhone and iPad, plus a Fujifilm X100S camera and a Garmin EDGE 500 GPS bike computer.

Let’s take a look.

DeGeo is an app that removes the location data from your photos before sharing them, while leaving non-location metadata intact. As someone who switches off the location option in Instagram whenever I’m at my home or a friend’s home, I’m totally into this $1 data stripper.

Richard Haberkern’s new GPS Cookie looks like a great little data logger for photographers, and a nice tracker for bikers, hikers and vacationers. It’s a tiny little puck which does nothing but detect GPS satellites and record it’s location periodically, so you can just switch it on an forget it.

GeoTagBee is a brand-new iPhone app for recording your wanderings in order to geotag photos later. Yes, it’s my new obsession. GeoTagBee’s stand out feature is its simplicity, although it manages to pack in some neat features anyway. Let’s take a look:

GeoTag Photos Pro just hit v3.0, and with the update comes a new, less-ugly UI. It also adds automatic Dropbox uploading, making it just about the easiest (and still most battery-friendly) photo-tagging app for the iPhone.

An update to the GPS photo-tagging app PlaceTagger brings support for the iPad, and also shows us exactly what iCloud was meant for. The v2.0 version not only lets you import photos via camera connection kit and then tag them right there on the iPad — it also syncs the GPS data seamlessly to the Mac version so you can tag photos right there. No tedious exporting of GPX files (unless you want to), nor even having to fix time discrepancies with the iPad and the camera’s clocks.

Before our full review next week, here’s a great little how-to guide on using geotagging in Lightroom 4. Adobe’s photo-editing and cataloging app has caught up with iPhoto and Aperture in its latest version, and you can now view any photos with embedded GPS co-ordinates on an in-app map. This means any of your iPhone photos can be browsed by location, which is a surprisingly useful tool.

But what if you want to reverse tag your photos? Say your camera doesn’t have GPS, but you have a track log recorded on a GPS device or with an iPhone app. How do you put this data together in a useful way? Below, Adobe’s Terry White shows us how.

The big news today is all about how Apple has apparently been busy secretly squirreling away data about your movements on your iPhone 4 or GPS-equipped iPad, and storing it in a file on your computer via syncing. Is this a big deal, or business as usual, just a giant tech company doing its thing?

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