How-To: Geotagging Photos

[Hells_Satans]

I wasn't sure if this should go under photography or GPS...

I wrote this tutorial for another forum, but I figured the good folks here on the Pashnit forums might benefit from it as well

What is geotagging? Basically, it’s the process of adding geographical data from your GPS to the photos taken with your digital camera. This means you will no longer need to remember exactly where you were when you had taken your digital photographs.

Most, if not all, digital cameras save the time and date when each photo is taken, and this data is embedded within each picture. We then can use some software to help us sync the GPS data with the photograph’s data and tag each photo’s location. To make the process as easy and as accurate as possible, you need to ensure that your camera's time & date is set the same as the GPS's (though there is the ability to take into account a known offset in time within the software used in this tutorial).

There are several pieces of software available that enable us to do this, here I am using Photomapper. I have found it to be the easiest and straightforward software application for this task… and it’s FREE! You can download the software here.

This “how-to” was written using Garmin MapSource software, and it’s the only GPS software I have any experience using, so I could only write this according to my own experience with the software that I have. The process is easy though, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to modify to work within your own needs and/or requirements.

First, you will need to import the relevant Track-Log from your GPS device. With my Zumo, this is done using MapSource. I won’t go into how this is done since its device specific, but all you really need to know about this step is that you will need your GPS Track-Log data to be saved as a .gpx type file. This is not the default file type for the Zumo, so I needed to use the drop down menu under “Save as type:” to get the option to save as a .gpx file. I saved the .gpx file on my desktop and then I saved my photos to my desktop in a folder named Mojave_Trip (for this example).





Next, in PhotoMapper, click on File / Import GPS Data then select the Track-Log file you saved (i.e. Mojave_Trip_Tracks.gpx), and your GPS data will be imported into Photomapper. When complete, it should appear something like this:



Now click on File / Import Images and browse to where your photo's are saved. Select one or more images in the dialog box that appears. The results should appear something like this:



Next, you will need to check to see if you need to include a time offset for the difference between the camera's time and the GPS's time. If you synchronized your camera with your GPS, this shouldn’t be necessary… but, clocks can drift… or you may have forgotten to synchronize your camera and GPS. Minor time lapses should not normally be a problem when synchronizing with GPS data, but just in case something goes awry, time can be adjusted up to +/- 12 hours and can also be adjusted for different time zones. Another reason this step may be necessary is if you turned your GPS off and continued to take pictures. Your Track-Log will not have any data to coincide with the time any photographs were taken while the GPS was off.



Adjusting time can get tricky, especially if you have multiple sets of photos that need different time adjustments made. When trying this myself, I noticed that you cannot adjust individual photos a different amount of time (for instance, if you stopped to visit a landmark or whatnot, turned your GPS off, and then took pictures at different times while walking around). This is an all or nothing deal, so you have to import GPS data and photo sets for each batch that needs a specific time adjustment made to it. This quickly turns into a PIA… so I now try to avoid turning my GPS off unless I’m stopping for a long period… like for a meal or something. If I walk around to take pictures, I take the GPS with me and just leave it on.

When you’ve completed making any necessary time adjustments, you’re ready for the next step. There are three options available to you at this point… “Tag selected images,” “Export to Google Earth,” and “Clear selected images.” I’ll start with Clear selected, since it’s the most self explanatory. This button does exactly what it says; it clears the selected images from the image table/list. If you want to make sure an image is not tagged, or if you wish to remove images that need a time adjustment made separately, etc… this is how you remove them from the list of photos.

The Tag selected images button will add the geographic location data to the selected images Exif data. When you have selected the images you wish to tag, press the Tag selected images button and the following option box will appear:



With the location data now embedded in the photos, when you upload them to certain photo hosting sites (I say “certain” sites because I don’t know the functionality or options for all of them), location information will automatically be seen for those images. (Flickr is used in this example)



*It may be necessary to adjust your uploading preferences/options on the photo hosting site in order for the geotagging information to be uploaded automatically (if it is present).



To export to Google Earth, select the images you wish to export in the image table (a not about selecting… any one field per row will work, and it doesn’t matter which field it is... rows that have no selected fields will not be exported). Press the Export to Google Earth button and a dialog box will appear that allows you to customize your export:



Once you’ve made your selections, pressing the OK button creates a Google Earth .kmz file that contains the locations of where the photos were taken as well as thumbnails of the photos.



That’s all there is to it!

Thanks for reading, and I hope that some find the info useful

[Nirvana]

How cool ! Thanks for sharing.