Friday 22 June 2007

GPS Tagging

If like me you have a phone which will tag your pics with GPS data (HP Ipaq 6915) - it can be quite handy to take a batch of pics with your favorite camera at a particular location and then take a GPS tagged one with the phone camera. Then when you get home use Picassa and Google Earth to copy the tag from the tagged pic to the others. Load the pics in Picassa and select the tagged one plus all the others at the same location. Then select menu item "Geotag with Google Earth". In Google earth select "Geotag all" and you're done. I then use Elements 5 for viewing them and further tagging.

Another method I use to tag my photos even more accurately and without having to remember to take a tagged photo is to use Microsoft's WWMX Location Stamper (freeware). Together with almost any GPS device it will correlate the pics you take with any camera with their location data. First sync the times on both devices. Then make sure your GPS device is recording a track in some format or another. Take your pics as normal. When you get home convert the track to GPX format if the file can't already be saved in that format. Use something like GPSBabel. I use Multimap to record the GPS data and it exports to GPX so easy peasy. Then load your photos in Location Stamper and select "Add Track". Find the GPX file and select "Apply Tracks". And seconds later all your photos will be Geotagged. I find the results very accurate indeed.