Justin Cox
Geotagging and You
A week ago at the now Apple-less MacWorld, Apple stick man Phill Schiller showed off a new version of iPhoto due out at the end of this month. There were a handful of very cool new features announced ranging from facial recognition to location detection. But the one that really caught my eye was geotagging. Sure, geotagging has been around for awhile now and some higher end DSLR cameras support it, but it’s still a relatively new technology that is very, very cool.
Basically geotagging uses GPS coordinates that are tagged into the EXIF metadata of a photo file allowing the exact location the picture was taken to be forever remembered. iPhoto ‘09 supports geotagged photos by showing off maps, allowing for Photo Books to be printed with location information, and more. This technology is very cool so I immediately set off to figure out how to start using it.
My Cannon Powershot is a few years old now and obviously doesn’t automatically geotag pictures. I had a few options, including upgrading to a new, very high-end camera, purchasing an Eye-Fi SD card or an external geotagging device. After some research and reviews, I decided upon the external device.
About the size of a cell phone.
My Amod geotagging unit arrived today and I put it through some initial paces. It’s a very simple unit, smaller than I thought it’d be. Once turned on it starts looking for satellite signals. It had some trouble finding an initial signal inside despite having a window-wall, but once I took it outside the device had no trouble at all. In fact, once it found the initial satellites, taking the unit inside didn’t affect the signal at all.
I took a quick ride around the neighborhood snapping a few pictures while the device was clipped to my belt. Once home I plugged it into my computer via a mini USB cable. The device comes with a piece of software that runs on OS X that allows you to manage and geotag photos, but if you want to actually write the GPS info to the EXIF file you have to pay for a “Pro” license upgrade. Considering iPhoto will need the GPS data written to the file to actually do what it does, this is kind of important. Luckily there are free alternatives as long as you’re willing to go through an extra step. I am.
The Amod device stores GPS data in a standard NEMA GPS .log file. This is the same format that plenty of other handheld GPS devices store information. The problem is the free software that will actually tag the files doesn’t read this particular standard format and opts for another standard, .gpx XML. So I needed to convert the file. Free software GPS Babel+ allowed me to do just that. Selecting the NEMA as the source and the GPX as the output did the trick. Once the new file is created, it was time to actually tag the files. For this another piece of free software, GPS Photo Linker does the trick.
I loaded the GPS file first, then added the photos. It’s important to note that for this to work best, the photos need to be tagged before they are put into iPhoto. So instead of using iPhoto to take the files from the camera I chose Image Capture. GPS Photo Linker takes the timestamp from the photos and matches that with the timestamps on the GPS tracks. When it finds a match it tag the photo. GPS Photo Linker has a batch mode that makes doing a full set very easy. After a few minutes work, my photos were all tagged and ready to play with.
Location redacted.
Fortunately I don’t have to wait until iPhoto ‘09 ships to play with the geotagging results. Preview 4.0, which is part of OS X 10.5 Leopard, already supports it. After opening a tagged file in Preview, open the Inspector and click the center “More Information” tab. A GPS option is now added that shows the coordinates and a Google map. Clicking the “Locate” button brings the location up on Google Maps in Safari so that you can zoom, compare with Street View and really see how cool the technology is. You can also upload the tagged images to Flickr which supports geotagged photos using a Yahoo maps look.
Considering this was also the cheepest option I found for upgrading to geotagging, I’ve got to say I’m pretty pleased. The basic support built into OS X is pretty cool which means the polished features in iPhoto will be outstanding. I can’t wait to play with it.
1/12/09
Zak Strassberg
Awesome! I can’t wait to get one of these for my own. I am going to be a geotagging machine!
to Zak Strassberg
1/19/10
Jimmy Balls
Justin,
Let us all hope that Apple does an upgrade to iPhoto on January 27th that includes the old capability of iPhoto 08 and your easy command of copying GPS data from the iPhone. They probably removed it from iPhoto 09 to preserve “their magic” for maybe this new release that we Geotagging people are hoping for. How did you first discover it in the 08 version?
to Jimmy Balls
1/20/10
Justin
It works fine in the ‘09 version. I don’t know if it’s available in the ‘08 version as I only last year upgraded to an iPhone with GPS capabilities.
to Justin