Geotagging

[Desertroad]

The thread on the General Desert Information forum got me to thinking. (Always dangerous!).

I am heavily involved with Geotagging digital photos, both at work and in my personal photography. I would love to hear from everyone on DUSA about their experience with embedding GPS data in digital photos. Any and all comments would be appreciated.

Technologically yours,

Desertroad

[TradClimber]

DR

I'm sure there must be an easier way – but here's how I geotag my photos.

One of the many properties of a jpeg file is a time stamp when the photo was taken.

Before I go hiking, I sync my camera time with my GPS receiver.

After the hike – I download my GPS tracks (which are also time stamped) along with the photos.

Now here's the dumb part – I manually match up the times for the lat/lon of the photo.

Any cheap (as in free) software to do this manual labor?

Thanks,

TradClimber

[Desertroad]

Hey TC ! !

Sorry I took so long to respond to your posting on this thread. I hadn't checked it in a while. Could that be because ABSOLUTELY NOBODY responded when I first posted back in November? But I'm not bitter...miffed, maybe...a little...

One can search "free geotagging software" online and find several applications that claim to tag your photos AND blow-dry your hair. Since I'm old and quite balding, none of these interest me. Many free software sites, however, do give me a bad hair day with all the popups and other intrusive advertising that follow. When, exactly, did the Internet become worse than CB radio?

So far, all of my Geotagging is done at work, a yet-to-remain-unnamed Federal Land Management Agency. It might rhyme with Bark Cervix. Or something.

We use geotagging to provide an additional dimension to the GPS field data we collect. It is also seeing increased use by our Fire and Law Enforcement personnel. Suffice it to say that our neighbors become quite surprised when we present maps AND geotagged photos depicting their plants/animals/abandoned vehicles and "medicinal" crops that we have to clean up after. Your tax dollars at work.

For my personal use, I made the mistake of investing in a Canon EOS 7D digital camera. No internal GPS chip. I gather from the online specs and blogs that the newer Nikon models are friendlier in this respect. Ah, well...live and learn. I have been reading up on the geotagging nuts and bolts, though. Search "exif.org" In all other ways my Canon rocks! There are GPS antennas that will mount to the hot shoe on top of most modern digital cameras and connect either with a cable or, in some cases, with a wireless connection, usually Bluetooth. Canon would love it if I bought their wireless module for a paltry $700

I wish to geotag photos for me to use as reference for my personal photography, as well as to provide navigation to my secret hiking and camping spots. And also because I'm a total tech-nerd and it's another excuse to blow money I don't have on more "toy" software.

Troad Guy

[Paul]

My process is similar to TradClimber's. I use a hand-held DeLorme GPS unit (PN-60) to record my track and just make sure my camera clock and the GPS clock are synchronized before I start. When I'm done, I save my track as a .gpx file and use Nikon's ViewNX2 to import the file and automatically embed the GPS data into the photos. ViewNX2 is a free download. Not sure how well it plays with Canon, but maybe Canon offers something similar.