Matching GPS Log Files to Photos

When first trying out the GPS match up in photo mechanic from GPS wayfiles and my photos I was out of internet accessible areas and could not look at the result on a map. When I finally did get a chance to check things where out all over the place. A real mess. Since I had had massive issues trying to synch my phone and camera I figure that was the issue. And it was … just not a matter of synching the current time.

The real issue was the fact the google my tracks app which I use on my phones, actually stored the time stamp in UTC (univeral coordinated time) which most people know as Greenwich Mean Time or GMT. This is for the simple reason that satellite position is reference to this time standard. At the moment its 11 hours behind our local time here on the eastern side of Australia. Once I realise this (its not documented anywhere I could find) everything else about loading the GPS wayfile (in gpx format) and merging the coordinates to my photos in photo mechanic was easy.

I’m doing the gps merge straight after the ingest step. I have to export the gps wayfile from My Tracks app in .gpx format (and despite what the app says it does not reliably export to my google drive anymore), so this is now a two step dance, export to the card in the phone, connect the phone to my computer and up load the .gpx file into the same directory as the photos. I then run File/Import GPS coordinates… from the main drop down menu. Which starts the dialogue show above. There are just four things to do/check.

1) Press the little add button in the GPS log file dialogue up on the top left, and use the normal file browse to select the .gpx file. Then press the plot GPS logs (you can have several files being processed together) and this will display a map of your path on the right hand panel.

2) the next important place to set up and/or check is the GMT Offset of photos panel on the right below the Map panel. First time you use it either enter the difference in your local time to GMT (11 hours in my case). You can also try using the Auto, but it seems to match your first photo with the first way point, and often I start the gps tracking well before I photograph. So there can be a mismatch (as I discovered the hard way)

3) The small panel on the right will show the first photo and coordinates. If the photo is miss located because of time difference you can make those changes easily by clicking on the small + and – button over under the map. Each time you press the button it moves onto the next way point (the ++ give you bigger steps). You just need to move the blue pin along the way path till it reaches the correct spot. you will also notice that the time offset is being changed in accordance with the shift. You can also step through the photos using the -> arrow keys below the photo in the panel on the lower right. Despite my best efforts to synchronise everything one camera is 4 minutes 30 slow the other 1 minute 25 seconds fast. These time difference make a difference even at m walking speeds. The time differences are “sticky” and show up next time you import more coordinates. So after a few ingest the small shifts are usually not required.

4) The last step is to click the Import GPS coordinates button in the lower right hand panel.

The whole process usually only takes less than a minute.

In the past I found picasa a reasonable way to review photo location for .jpeg files. Even Microsoft photo will display a map for an individual photo once it has lat and log coordinates. However I have had very mixed results trying to use Lightroom (it will read the coordinates from the way files and do a merge with photos but very often refuses to display map backgrounds so it a bit impossible to check and got it wrong more often than not. I had used a special apps such as geotag and geo tracker to do the merge but that was also tedious and error prone, so I had got used to only occasionally bothering to geotag a sample batch. Just manually locating a few photo in Flickr, when appropriate.

The new approach with photo mechanic is so quick and easy I am doing it routinely again. I’m even going back and redoing a few of those batches of the photos in the past for which I still do have gps wayfiles. Geotagging is back on my agenda

More walking to KEEPMyTracks

I had started planning this walk a week ago to continue my tiny protest about google shutting down the wonderful little app called My Tracks. This app lets you record your track (wayfile in gps jargon) using any android phone fitted with a gps reciever. I had decided it might be interesting, and good exercise as well, to find some routes that trace out the google My Tracks logo (an orange arrowhead). My second walk was more ambitious (and much hillier). I had mapped out the rough route on google maps and even did a quick distance estimate using the built in tools, which suggested around 2.52km, which sounded about right and even taking a few photos should not take more than 30 mins. It even found and recharged up an old HTC phone which also had My Tracks loaded (but no SIM card). I figured without net access I’d be able to keep using MyTracks as a standalone app, even if google officially turned off the map access and sharing etc.

Then I went for the walk, only to immediately find their was no footpath for the first part of my trip. That’s ok I just cut through the trees and mga carpark. The obvious photos being the vista over to Mt Dandenong, Alas every where I tried to get a good vantage point the view was partly blocked, Then I discovered the my track on my android was frozen (or my tracks had not actually started taking readings, which is a problem I had noticed before on both my phones). The downhill on the first leg was easy. The uphill on the next two legs more challenging and rose a sweat. When I was only  half way up the second leg and the gps read I had travelled 2.33 km I started to think something fishy here. The finished loop gave me a reading of 3.91km. That’s big discrepancy that can not be easily explained by my small deviation along the way by necessity or to take photos. When I look at the tracks and compare the two phones, the newer LG phone has quiet a few jaggy bits which I clearly did not take. The HTC path is much more constant and follows the road more closely but is missing perhaps the first 300m (it gives remaining distance as 2.5km). With my confidence in the gps tracking a little dinted by this, I then discovered that the normal update to google drive didn’t work. The kmz files where making it to the web its just the desktop app that keeps a local copy of my google drive is “unable to connect”, and no way to find out why. has the desktop sync app for google drive been [DEPECATED ] as well? Google what's going on?

Maybe this gps tracking, and its precision, needs further investigation?

MyTracks might be [DEPRECATED] but still appreciated

[DEPRECATED] in the square brackets is a particular google-ish word, that signifies google considers the software or devices is not longer appreciated, so google seems to have no qualms in killing them off despite a loyal band of users who love and use the applications daily. Unfortunately they have history, remember Google Reader, Wave, Google Buzz, Chrome to Phone and now MyTracks.

I have tried out a quite a few GPS apps for my phone, most have great features but are real battery hogs and many need to be on-line all the time. I had found that tracker was great for capturing my path with the added benefit I could see a map if required or stats on how far I’d walk and time taken (ie how long it might take me to get back to the start). You can also annotate points along the way, a very useful feature when you are scouting for locations or have something important to tag on your photos. It can give synthesized voice reports on progress “you have walked 5 kilometers” etc. and other less than useful "calory counter”, and other “toy” stuff. If you don't want an interactive map and reasonable time between waypoint (eg 5 minutes) you don’t get such dramatic phone battery drain.  It exports the common GPX and KML formats, that can be loaded into a number of photomanagment packages to tag photos taken during that timeframe with their most appropriate geotags (aka location for the apple fan boys). In other words it was a nice little program for a wandering photographer.

After the 30th April the Tracks app will no longer be available on the Google Play Store, but I hope it will still work. However I’m back to looking for a replacement, another google disappointment to erode my trust.

A couple of weeks ago I was walking along the track beside Patterson river to the beach and I lost my lens cap (not an unusual occurrence) I had a good look on the beach but couldn’t see it there, Then I remembered the gps was on so I retraced my steps and in a spot I where had clambered down the rock on the river wall to take a couple of “textures” of the rock work there was my lens cap in a crack between the rocks. Without being able to view the gps I never would have been able to return to that point and even with careful looking from the track would not have been able to recognized the rocks and peer into the gap between them especially with the tide rising.

PS: Join me by doing your own gps doodle #KEEPMyTracks

Picasa Web Albums are still there, albeit harder to find

I recently tried to add the location to a photo to a photo already posted in Google+, and could not find any option to do it. That surprised me as it was always possible in picasa web albums. I could have of coarse added the location in picasa and re-uploaded the photo. This however leaves a duplication and any comments, views and links are not carried across. I wanted to just upload the photo already posted. I did manage to find a way to get the picasa web album view and add a location but it is somewhat harder to find that photo presentation format today.



One thing that needs to be explained is that trying to access picasa web albums via any update version of picasa (ie 3.9) actually take you to a google+ photos view, not to picasa web albums. Further the neat link I gave back in March, no longer works either, it also takes you direct to Google+ Photos




https://picasaweb.google.com/home
(this link no longer works, you will be redirected to google+ photos)








https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/myphotos?noredirect=1
This link still works (at the moment!)

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.

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)