Geotagging Photos

[RedMan]

It always frustrated me that over the years I have taken LOTS of pictures and despite the enormous size of my head I can't seem to recall the EXACT date, time and location of the pictures I take.

So I set out to remedy that.

I bought an Itronix Gobook III laptop on ebay (~$200). This is a rugged aka dust and waterproof laptop. It came with a vehicle docking station, has built in GPS, wifi, touchscreen etc etc.

Installed National Geo TOPO! state series software for CO, UT, AZ, NV, ID, WY. It will record my trips and help on the trail.

Installed Geosetter (free). Geosetter will take the GPS track and match it using timestamps to the photos from my camera. The GPS info and any other info I want are inserted in the EXIF information on each digital photo. Including things like copyright, comments etc. I can then use the photos anyway I want and all the info stays with the photo as long as the EXIF is not stripped out. (some photo sites stip EXIF to save space)

There are several of these Geotagging software packages out there. GeoRob is one. I like GeoSetter, it seems to work well and its free. Does a great job of mating pictures to GPS locations even if the time stamps in the camera and the GPS do not match perfectly. Its very easy to take a look at the google maps and verify that the tags are correct and adjust them if needed.

Now I can upload them to Picasa web albums or Flicker (using Flickerfly) and the photos will be linked to google maps.

BTW, you can do this using a cheap portable GPS. Geosetter requires a .GPX input format so I suggest you get gpsbabel (free) to convert the native file type output form your gps to .gpx format.

The next step is to get an Eye-FI card fro the camera so the pictures will automagically upload to the laptop everytime I get back in the rig.

So why the laptop you ask? Primarily so I can do some of the work messing with the pictures in the field. I never seem to have the time after I get home to do all the crap I wanted for a trip. I kept dragging my macbook pro along and it is slowly getting beat up. Now I have a dedicated beater.

Here is a screenshot of GeoSetter after tagging a trip to town.
I don't have to hear "Cool picture, how do I get there?" anymore.

Now how can I turn this mess into a trail going webcam? Hmm.

[Redpb]

You're an ambitious feller.

[rooster32]

Thats too much work!

I bought a Nikon GPS-1 that plugs into the camera and embeds the gps location/date in the picture exif info.

Its slick.