I recently bought a copy of Lightroom 2.0 and have it installed on my Windows 7 x64 installation. I was quite surprised that Lightroom didn’t have any features for geo data. I found that I couldn’t merge geo data from my Sony GPS-CS1 GPS unit. But it was not more then one search on Google with the words “lightroom gps” and I was on the track of getting my problem solved. On LightroonNews I found the article GPS metadata in Lightroom and Google Maps, and it turns out that basically, if you have GPS metadata embedded in an image file, Lightroom will let you link directly to Google Maps and locate exactly where that photograph had been taken. Lightroom does not allow direct input or in-line editing of GPS data, in fact the GPS fields only appear in the metadata panel when you’ve selected an image that has GPS data already embedded.

So the big question is how do I get the metadata merged in to the pictures on my Nikon D60? On my Mac, I use HoudahGeo to get the geo data in with the rest of the EXIF metadata stored within the pictures. I found that the photo entusiast Jeffrey Friedl has made a Geoencoding plugin for Lightroom 2.0. It is distributed as “donationware”. That basically means that it is provided as free. So also in this case for the first six weeks, after which it becomes limited to geoencoding 10 photos at a time until registered. Registration is only 1 cent. So I guess I will end up paying the normal 15-20 dollars, as I do for most of the shareware I buy. But first, I would like to try it!

Installation is fairly easy. Just install the plugin in to the following directory: \Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Lightroom\Plugins\

Lightroom with GPS support