Posts tagged Geotagging

I have since spring this year been working with trend analyzes on where the Internet is going. There are many great Web 2.0 applications out there, and some of them combines great hardware, desktop and web applications in ways that 2-3 years ago were unthinkable.

On Friday I bought a Sony GPS-CS1 at FOTOVIDEO. So why this device? GPS-CS1 officially only comes with support for Windows, but being a USB device that mounts on your desktop like a USB Pen Drive, should make it close to platform independent! No advanced Bluetooth driver is needed. I’m keeping my private photos on my MacBook Pro, so for me MacOS X support was a need. Having said that you might get problems with mounting the device on older versions of MacOS X, but Apple have confirmed that the latest Mac OS X Leopard release, from 10.5.3, has support for the device. But I don’t want to only use it to geotag my photos, I also want to use the device to track my bike trips – http://www.mapmyride.com/.

Sony also only list support for various Sony cameraes, but the device syncs well with non-Sony cameras as GPS location data and jpeg metadata (EXIF 2.1) are standards. I used an old Konica Minolta camera for my first tests, and will later test it with a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX35 camera. The unit weights 55 g and can store your geographic position four times a minute, which makes about 15 days worth of trackpoints on the 31 MB of internal memory. Battery life should be about 10 hours on AA batteries. GPS-CS1 make it a great deal for those of us who only want a photo tagger, don’t need a full-size GPS unit, and don’t want to buy a GPS camera.

The GPS-CS1 device lets you attach it to a backback or belt loop, so that you carry around while you shoot. It records your GPS location and this information can later be synchronized with your digital images to provide a map of where your photos were taken, by using date and time information stored in the image headers. For this reason it’s important to make sure the clock on the digital camera is correctly set. No setting is needed on the GPS device because the time is also transmitted on the satellite signal.

I use Flickr for photo sharing. There’s a setting there that you have to manually change before you upload EXIF-geotagged photos; once you do this, it’ll map all newly-uploaded photos automagically! I have long wanted to arrange my pictures geographically on Flickr. This can of course be done manually, but that is taking a lot of time. With a GPS you can import the logged data in to Flickr, but first you must enable “Import EXIF location data” in your account settings (see screenshot above).

I chose HoudahGeo as my preferred application for merging photos with geo dato. The application has a lot of potential, and I find it to be the best one available on the Mac platform. And the price? Yes, great software rarely comes for free. The application costs 25 euros, and is worth every cent! I have a few words about their support service as well. I fired of a question to their published e-mail address last Sunday morning, and got it answered a few moments later. Unexpected and very pleasant! I have a few suggestions for improvements of the application that I have included in this blog entry.

The first button lets users import photos directly from iPhoto. The window that appears should be familiar for all users used to using the iLife applications. A great feature is that drag and drop from iPhoto is supported too. Even the name and comments fields from iPhoto are imported too! Photos can also be imported by clicking on the second button in toolbar.

HoudahGeo synchronizes the images on your digital camera with the latitude, longitude and time readings from several GPS devices (Garmin, Magellan and Wintec) over Bluetooth, but it can also read the data from files from devices mounted with USB (as the GPS-CS1 device). The Sony device stores the geo data in .log files, so it’s just to choose the correct file:

Adding the geo data to the photos are done in a matter of one or two seconds, and you are then ready to go the three last buttons in the toolbar. The first button writes the saves the geo data to the pictures, the second exports the EXIF data and the pictures to Google Earth or Google Maps, and the third one uploads the photos with geo data to Flickr.

HoudahGeo supports upload of selected photos to Flickr. You can also set it to only upload photos that have been geocoded. Just as the official Flickr Uploadr, you can define the maximum image size (resolution) for the photos when uploaded in Flickr. The last option “Include machine tags” shows the geo data as metadata in Flickr.

Before it starts uploading the photos to Flickr, you are asked to authorize HoudahGeo as a trusted Flickr application (the app can later be deleted in your Flickr settings.

I would like to see a better integration with Flickr. I truely miss not being able to add the photos that I am about to upload to an existing set or create a new one. It would also be great to add other tags than machine tags.

PS! You don’t need to purchase a GPS device to enjoy the wonders of HoudahGeo, the application can also be used to manually add geocoding to photos by using Google Earth or Google Maps.