Free Geography Tools

A few years ago, Microsoft was promoting something called the World Wide Media Exchange, WMMX for short, a centralized index of photos tagged by geographic location - sort of a proto-Flickr. It got a bit of press, but seems to have faded into obscurity. But it’s left behind a few useful utilities, including a nice, simple photo geotagging utility called Location Stamper.

You can download WMMX Location Stamper from this link. Note that while you need to have Microsoft .NET 1.1 or higher installed, you probably already have that on our system. You don’t need the WMMX Client Application at all unless you want it - it’s the program that lets you upload and browse photos in the WMMX index, and create photo slideshows, but isn’t required for the Location Stamper or any of the other utilities on this page. Install Location Stamper, then run it.

Not a lot of options, but it doesn’t need many. Add photos to be geotagged using the Photos => Add Photos menu, and they’ll show up as thumbnails on the right. Add your GPX track with the Tracks => Add Tracks menu, and the track will be loaded into the map window at left, along with an antique Microsoft MapPoint map for the area (it would be nice if they would update this with Virtual Earth, but I wouldn’t hold my breath). Click on the “Apply Tracks” button in the lower right, and the location/time data from the GPX track will be matched with the timestamp on the photo to geotag it. Select a photo that’s been geotagged, and a circle will appear on the track in the map window to show its location.

You can also geotag photos by zooming in to a location in the map window (click on the blue globe in the upper left to bring up a map if nothing is showing, or enter a location in the search box at the bottom), and then dragging a photo to a location on the map. But the map quality is so poor, it isn’t all that useful an option here - you’d be better off using Picasa with Google Earth for this kind of tagging.

Photos geotagged by Location Stamper appear to have fully-legitimate EXIF geographic tags, but as with locr, Picasa doesn’t seem to be able to recognize those tags. But EXIFTool, along with my utility, can modify the header so that Picasa does recognize the geotags.

As long as you’re checking out WMMX Location Stamper, you might take a look at some of the other utilities you can download from the WMMX page. The WMMX Travelogue Authoring Tool lets you create a geographic web page with your geotagged photos, maps, text and GPX tracks. If you download and install the full WMMX Client, you can create photo slideshows with maps and pop-ups that can be converted into files for viewing with the stand-alone WMMX Story Viewer.

Actual screenshot

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Actual screenshot