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Thursday, May 5, 2011

Geotagging Photos

“Geo-tagging is the process of adding geographical identification metadata to various media such as photographs…” (source: wikipedia)
The problem:
you go on a hike or somewhere out in nature and take pictures with a camera instead of your cell phone because you want decent photos. However, you would like to geo-tag these photos so you would remember where they were taken.
I tried apps that let you mark a lat/long, but that just adds an extra thing to do every time I want to take a picture, who has time to do that when you’re on the go?
The solution:
Android phone + camera + few desktop apps = eureka!
and here’s how I did it:
  1. Sync the time on your smartphone and your camera before you start (I will explain later), doesn’t have to be to the second, but at least to the minute.
  2. Track your locations. I like to use Google’s My Tracks app. I’ve found it best to keep the default settings, trust Google. There are alternatives for iPhone, like EveryTrail
  3. When I’m back at my PC I export my track as a GPX file (which is really an XML file with lat, long, and time coordinates) and save it to my PC
  4. Download the pictures from your camera to your PC
  5. Matching the pictures to locations:
    I use a program called Grazer where I load the GPX file and select the folder with my pics and it matches the times stamp on the picture to the time stamp in the GPX file.
End result: geo-tagged photos taken by a real camera, not the inferior cameras on cell phones. That’s all it takes. I like to post my hikes online to EveryTrail’s website where it creates a map with my path and pictures I geotagged.

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