Geotagging

I've been playing around with my GPS lately... geocaching, and hunting for benchmarks, and such. And I also enjoy photography and take a lot of pictures.

The camera on my Blackberry geotags photos with coordinates from its internal GPS, and after I upload them to flickr I can display them on a map, which is pretty cool.

The only problem is that as a camera, the Blackberry is a pretty good telephone. But using it caused me to wonder about geotagging images from a real camera. Flickr lets you drag and drop photos on to their map, but that depends on remembering where you took the photo and being able to find it on the map!

Software to the rescue! There is software out there that takes a track from your GPS, and uses it to tag photos with coordinates based on where you were at the time the photo was taken.

For starters, you need to get the tracks from your GPS to the computer. The software that came with my Garmin works fine for this. But EasyGPS is actually easier to use, and takes up less space on my laptop's tiny hard drive. (The only problem is that easygps doesn't display an actual map, but for our purposes that doesn't matter.)

There are several programs that will merge the track data with your photos. The one I use is Photomapper. (EasyGPS and Photomapper are both free.)

Here's a brief tutorial on geotagging your digital photos.

1) Set the clock on your digital camera. I had never bothered to do this before but it's important for this process. The time and date on your photos has to coordinate with the time and date on your GPS track, so make sure that your camera's clock agrees with your GPS!

2) Turn on your GPS. My Garmin eTrex automatically starts recording a track whenever it is turned on. If yours doesn't, then push whatever buttons it takes to make it start recording.

3) Go out and take some pictures!

4) Hook your GPS to your computer, and using either EasyGPS or whatever software came with your GPS unit, save the track. Photomapper accepts a number of formats for this, but GPS eXchange Format (.gpx) seems to be the most universal.

5) Upload your photos to your computer.

6) Start Photomapper.

7) The "File" menu in Photomapper has only three choices: Import GPS Data, Import Images, and Quit. You can probably figure out what to do from here, but I'll continue. Select "Import GPS Data" and load the .gpx file you saved in step 4. Then select "Import Images" and navigate to the folder with your pictures.

8) Photomapper then matches up the timestamps on the photos with the locations in your GPX track. It will show you a map (from Google Maps) with the locations of your photos, and a list of photos with latitude and longitude displayed.

9) Now click "tag selected images" and Photomapper will add the geotagging data to the image files. It also gives you the option to export them to Google Earth, but I don't because I'm going to upload them to Flickr.

If you are using Flickr, you'll need to set your account to allow the import of EXIF geotags when you upload images. Click this link to set this permission.

After that is done, you can upload the pictures. I saved my test run photos into a set, and viewed that set on a map. It came out looking like this:


If you'd like to see it "live," here's the link: Geotagging experiment map view