Trying some alternate geotagging software

I’ve been a bit quiet about geotagging lately, because I was been happy with my two favourite approaches to geotagging, using picasa/google earth &/or geosetter, also I am still a little worried about the dangers of over publising my location details. I do like being able to set the gps on my phone on, and collect a wayfile as I take my photos. Then I can later use this to match up with my photos, and have the embedded location in the EXIF metadata, the hassle here is getting the time matching, but once you figure out how the time shifting works it is nice to have your photos also organized by location.

Picasa (and google maps)

This is probably the preferred google way to do this. Rather than use the tools/geotag/geotag with google earth... you can just click on the red map tag on the left hand side of the individual photo or folder view screen. This pulls out the map dialogue, which is essentially a google map window. You must basically navigate to the photo location using an address, and you can not load your gps wayfile. However it is very easy to use and it immediately write the GPS coordinates (rather than the address) back into EXIF Metadata of the photo.

Lighroom 5 beta

Possibly like most Lightroom user, I did look at the Map module in version LR4 and had a little play but kind of dismissed it as nice but not what I wanted. Probably the biggest thing at the time was the fact that the location details where keep back in the main catalogue. It was a fair bit of work to ensure that the location detail got back into the EXIF data, also I has trouble loading and particularly got lost on the time shift dialogues. I suspect that not many lightroom fans have really delved However I have had a relook at the LR5 beta Map Module , and although I can’t see any major updates but I have found the gps tacklog load and matching does work well now. It also has a nice reverse geocoding feature that will determine the address and write that into the IPTC data. There is still the issue of the extra steps to write this back into the photos (or XMP sidecar files) however overall I it is pretty easy to use.

Photo Mechanic

  
I’m only trying out the demo version of photo mechanic, initially just to review photo load times, but I soon discovered it has neat getagging feature, being able to merge gps wayfiles (albeit I have only had success with .gpx files captured my google’s my tracks app on an android phone) and also accommodate timeshifts between the camera and gps device. Like picasa the details are written back into the embedded metadata in the original file (both jpeg & RAW). Photo Mechanic also have some very nice features for working with EXIF and IPTC metadata, including a IPTC stationery pad that lets you quickly update a lot of standard photo captioning. Also like picasa this is efficient and fast. This is a serious alternative to geosetter, that many keen photographers may already have.

Getting location into your photos is only the beginning, the real power comes with being able to use that as an additional means to organize and view your data. all of these options do give decent maps but you have to select the photos some other way first before you display them on a map.

Thomas Hawk @ Googleplex

This is quiet a long video, but it is a talk by Thomas Hawk, who you probably already know of if you are on Flickr or Google+. If you don’t know of him he is worthwhile following. He has two massively ambitious projects, one to publish 1 million photos in his life time and the second to photograph Americas top 100 cities. This is a refreshing simple presentation of how one photographers works, how he makes time and uses it as efficiently as possible and still has a real life, There is also a fair bit about sharing photos on-line.

Located at last

I've kind of given up with the Yahoo Map issue and accuracy on flickr, I still prefer to use google earth, and if you don't like that, try Loc.alize it is great also. However in the interest of getting all my big landscape set geotagged I've bitten the bullet and retro geotagged all the photos (that had not been previously tagged) using the MAP feature in flickr. So Sorry about all the different names for essentially the same place and poor precision on locating a few places. Such is Life.

No need for special gadgets

Whenever I mention geotagging to others, the topic automatically seems to become about GPS in gadgets. Well I start to explain you don't need them you can geotag your photos already without fancy stuff.

1. You can use Picasa and Google Earth. If you haven't done it yet click on the link in the previous sentence, to my original post of 18 months ago. The method is still the same and it is still my preferred approach. My one disappointment is you can not make use of the coordinates in the management of searching for files within picasa (as yet).
2. You can uses the map feature in Flickr. I must admit I am not happy with the yahoo map engine flickr use, its hopeless in terms of detail and frequently gives and incorrect location description, for the places i visit. For example when I geotagged my last photo in flickr it gave the location as mirbo south (which does not exist to the best of my knowledge) and mirbo north which does exist is about 50Kms away!
3. You can use software such as the popular RoboGEO, which embeds the geotagging coordinates inside the photo's EXIF data. It has a wealth of features to match automatically from Garmen units, and most other GPS unit via wayfiles, and other tracking format as well as some nifty export features. There is a downloadable demo version.
4. A nice freeware application is called Geosetter for windows. Whilst this does have the ability to sync with some track files, it is its very simple method of manually geotagging with google maps that makes this a very worthwhile tool, for those without the fancy gadgets.

But if you are still gadget mad, read the wired article GPS Adds Dimension to Online Photos

Geotagging: google maps on your phone

If you have a newish mobile phone, with net access and the ability to run java applications you can get google maps on your phone. Being google maps (as opposed to flickr's yahoo maps) local detail and the related satellite imagery for Australia is pretty good. In the town you can get down to street level, no worries. It is basically designed to help you find things (like business) However it is off the beaten track that geotagging photographers will find the google maps satellite images impressive, not quiet as good as a GPS but with a little practise I'm sure most of use will be able to get our photographic locations within at least a few 100 meters AND it is easy to save these locations as placemarkers in favourites (pressing the * key will redisplay them) BUT I haven't figured out how to merge the location details into my cameras EXIF data, well yet!

If you are interested, enter the following URL into your phone's browser -
www.google.com/gmm
It will initially download the 129kb of software then guide you into the maps.


See where this picture was taken. [?]

Small Warning: Zooming and panning satellite photos can involves serious amounts of data downloading, so check your phone contract before you start and get too enthusiastic, to make sure it is not too expensive!

PS: Seems I have not checked yahoo maps, via flickr, recently enough; the resolution in melbourne was improved a dramatically (it needed too)