blankblank blank


Archive for the 'geotagging' Category

Automating Your Garmin Oregon Photo Geotagging Flow Using GeoHarvest

There are a number of stand-alone Windows apps and web apps that led you geotag photos by matching the time they were taken with points on a GPS track (see the geotagging category of this blog for examples). But all of them require you to start up the program, load in the photos, load in the GPS track, and then start up the geotagging process. Flip Fahrenfort geotags a lot of his photos, and got tired of the multiple steps involved. So he wrote GeoHarvest, a program that automates the process to a large degree for owners of Oregon Garmin GPS units. When a memory card or camera is attached to your computer, it can automatically download a copy of digital photos from a memory card/camera to a folder of your choice, and keeps track of the photo filenames. When you connect a GPS, it will download track data and save it in GPX format. It then matches up the track times with the times the photos were taken, and geotags the photos with the appropriate coordinates.

The program can run continuously on your system, monitoring for all inserted memory cards or attached cameras with images to download, or GPS units with tracks to download as well. But if you want it to run this way, you’ll have to copy a shortcut to the program to your Startup folder manually, since the program doesn’t come with an install program that does that. It also can run in single-transfer mode, so that you can connect the data sources, have the photos geotagged automatically, then have the program terminate.

Unfortunately, since I don’t own a Garmin Oregon unit, I was unable to figure out how well it works with that unit. And while the program option suggest that you should be able to get the program to work with other GPS models with some manual work, I was repeatedly unsuccessful at this – GeoHarvest refused to accept GPX files generated by multiple programs. There are online help pages on program configuration and usage; if you can get it to work with your non-Oregon GPS, please leave a comment below.




Online Photo Geotagging With GeoImgr

I’ve covered a fair number of stand-alone geotagging apps before; check the geotagging category on this blog for some examples. But if you don’t have a geotagging application on the computer you’re using, GeoImgr is a web-based app that can geotag photos with a simple Google-Maps-based interface. First, upload a single picture (no batch uploading, unfortunately). GeoImgr lets you upload the image at its full original resolution, so this can take a few seconds. Once uploaded,  a thumbnail of the uploaded photo will appear at upper right:

geoimgr1

Then position the marker in the Google Maps interface at the location where the photo was taken.  Click and drag to move the map, zoom in by clicking the plus button or double-clicking on the map, and position the marker with a single click:

geoimgr2

The position of the marker will be continuously updated at right; click on “tag photo!”, and those marker coordinates will be embedded in the photo’s header. When you click “download photo!”, the geotagged photo will be downloaded with its original filename intact, and the image data unmodified.

Not a substitute for a good stand-alone app, but does the job, easy to use, and always available online.

HT to Michael Kempf (creator of the site).




Updates To Photo GeoTagging Software

Updates to report on several photo geotagging applications covered previously on this blog:

Grazer: Grazer is a very simple and easy to use geotagging program. However, the first time I looked at it, it had difficulty matching up the times in my GPX track with the times in my photos, even though other applications had no such issues. Supposedly those problems have been fixed, and the program modified to run in Vista, and a quick test confirmed that. The feature set is a bit thin, but that also means there are fewer options to confuse you with. Still not my top choice, but now that it actually does work, it might be worth a look for someone looking for a very simple geotagging app. Windows only.

Prune: Version 7 of Prune is out, with a slew of new features:

  • Loading of KMZ files and zipped GPX
  • Improved compression functions with four configurable algorithms
  • New function to call gpsbabel to send data directly to GPS receiver
  • Charting functions (eg altitude or speed against distance) using gnuplot
  • Map view can now use other OpenStreetMap images such as OpenCycleMap, OpenPisteMap or any other tile server
  • New function to create an average position from a track section
  • Display of straight line distances between waypoints

Since it’s a Java application, it should run on any platform that supports Java, including Mac OS X and Linux. Note: You will need to download EXIFTool to geotag photos. You will also need to both “Correlate” photos, then explicitly tell the program to “Save to EXIF” to embed the geotagging data; just correlating alone doesn’t save the geotagging data.

GeoSetter: My favorite free geotagging application (Windows only); bit of a learning curve, but it’s worth it. Since my first post on it over a year ago, lots of improvements and bug fixes; most recently, the latest version of EXIFTool was added.




Prune Updated To 6.0 – Photo Geotagging And GPS Track Visualization For Windows, Mac And Linux

The Java-based GPS and geotagging application Prune, covered in earlier posts, has been updated to version 6.0. New features include:

  • Map view using OpenStreetMap images is now integrated in the main window, with control for map transparency; you can open up an OSM map or Google Map for the track location in a browser as well

Prune Java-based geotagging application
(You may have to turn off the firewall in Windows to get this to work)

  • Pov export has a new option to use sphere sweeps for better appearance
  • New function to check online for a newer version of Prune
  • New function to take a section of track and cut/paste it to another position
  • New function to add or subtract a time offset from point timestamps to correct for time shifts between a GPS track and camera time
  • New function to call gpsbabel to load data directly from GPS receiver
  • Additional file filter options on load and save
  • Italian language support

Full support for all its features requires downloading of the Java3D library, exiftool, and GPSBabel.




Easy Ways To Get Latitude/Longitude For A Screen Point In Google Earth

In the lower left-hand corner of Google Earth, there’s a latitude/longitude readout that shows the position at the cursor position:

9-21-2008-9.02.12 PM

But if you want to record this position, the screen readout is graphical, so you can’t copy the numbers directly from Google Earth using a copy-and-paste operation; you have to write them out manually. One way around this is to create a placemark in Google Earth, and drag it to the desired location; the latitude and longitude will show up in the placemarks properties window, from which you can copy and paste them into a different app:

9-21-2008-9.06.51 PM

Another option is to use David Tryse’s Google Earth Position application. No installation, just run the program at the same time as Google Earth:

9-21-2008-9.15.26 PM

With Auto checked, it will update the position at the center of your Google Earth display continuously; unchecked, you’ll need to click the “GetPos” button to update the position. Clicking on the various “Copy” buttons copies position data into your clipboard for pasting into various programs:

Copy LatLong: 34.756012    -111.495048

Copy LookAt: 34.756012    -111.495048    0    812729.99    0.00    -9.43

Copy LatLong KML: <coordinates>-111.495048,34.756012,0</coordinates>

Copy LookAt KML: <LookAt>
<longitude>-111.495048</longitude>
<latitude>34.756012</latitude>
<altitude>0</altitude>
<range>812729.99</range>
<tilt>0.00</tilt>
<heading>-9.43</heading>
</LookAt>

With Auto unchecked, you can also enter a position into the Latitude and Longitude boxes at the top, and “FlyTo” that position in Google Earth. The numbered boxes at the bottom can save a current location (Shift-Click on the button), fly to a saved position (click on the button), or recall a saved position without flying to it (Alt-Click).

One big problem: there’s no center cursor or marker in Google Earth to indicate the center of the screen, so finding the position of a specific location might be difficultFixed in the latest version. But here’s a simple little KMZ file that puts a crosshair overlay at the center of the Google Earth screen, getting around this problem:

9-21-2008-9.24.55 PM

David’s website has several other apps worth a look. Google Earth Photo Tag lets you use Google Earth to embed location information into JPEG pictures (note: requires the Exiv2.exe command-line program in the same directory) . While I prefer Picasa for this task, GE Photo Tag does let you modify the balloon style for KML image files, which Picasa doesn’t. LatLong Conversion converts from degrees-minutes-seconds to decimal degrees and vice-versa, supporting more formats for the input data than other similar converters.




The Simplest Windows Photo GeoTagging Tool

The website for GEOTaggingTool is in Russian, there’s no English documentation there, and there’s no help file included with the program. But as long as you can find the download link at upper left for version 0.5.1, that’s all you need. The program itself is in English, and there’s no install program; just unzip it into a folder. This has to be the simplest Windows photo geotagging application out there; click one button to open the GPX track, click another to open the images folder, then click “Process GEOTagging!” and the images will be geotagged (but be warned, the old images will be overwritten with the new geotagged versions without notice).

5-17-2008-4.49.51 PM

The only available options are setting the time offset and window for matching GPS track times with photo times, but GEOTaggingTool handled the time offset between my local camera time and UTC GPS time without touching these. Fast, simple and easy.

Note: Requires Microsoft .Net 2.0.




Simple Geotagged Photo KML File Creator For PC/Mac

PhotoKML is a small (<300K download) Java application (PC and Mac) that takes a folder full of geotagged photos, and creates a KML file with points linked to moderate-sized thumbnails of those photos. Interface is simple; select a folder containing georeferenced photos, and a folder where you want to save the KMZ file:

5-17-2008-4.24.25 PM

Make sure the “Yes” button is selected at the top. While the program says it’s able to georeference photos using a GPS file, the only format it accepts is the “.trk” format. If you have your track in a more standard format like GPX, good luck finding a program that can convert it to the “trk” format (I couldn’t even get GPSBabel to work). If you want the point icons in Google Earth to be mini-versions of the pictures instead of pushpins, check the box at the bottom.

Click “Generate KML”, and you’ll have your KMZ file in a few seconds; you’ll have to open it manually in Google Earth:

5-17-2008-4.32.24 PM

Nothing fancy, but PhotoKML does the job quickly and easily.




Microsoft's New Photo Geotagging Tool

I covered Microsoft’s old photo geotagging tool WMMX Location Stamper a while ago in this post. Location Stamper uses Microsoft’s MapPoint maps in the display, which are already out-of-date, and I said it would be nice if they could add Virtual Earth to the app but wasn’t holding my breath. Good thing, because Microsoft has apparently abandoned that program in favor of a new one called Microsoft Pro Photo Tools. This is actually more than just a simple photo geotagging tool – it’s a full EXIF header editor, allowing individual or batch editing of metadata like description, keywords, copyright, date and time, etc. But here, I’ll talk mainly about the geotagging capabilities.

After you load in an image or set of images, they’ll be displayed in a thumbnail view at the bottom; click on the MapBrowse tab, and you’ll get a 2-D Microsoft Virtual Earth view, with the option of 3-D if you have that installed on your system (if you don’t, you’ll be given the option to install it then and there). You now have several choices for geotagging photos:

  • Right-click on a photo or group of selected photos, and choose “Select GPS location for this image”. This will create a pushpin on the map that you can drag to the desired location
  • If you have address/location information in the EXIF header, or if you enter it now, and click the “Get GPS Info” button, the program will look up the coordinates for that location, and tag the photo with those coordinates. Conversely, if the photo is already geotagged, you can look up a geographic location associated with those coordinates by clicking the “Get location text” button, and have that entered into the picture’s EXIF header. That includes numerical street addresses, a feature that other similar programs like GeoSetter don’t have.
  • As with other geotagging programs, you can load in a GPX file, and have the program associate coordinates with the pictures based on time. Load in a track with the “Load from file” button, select all the thumbnails you want to geotag, and click the “Place images on map” button. There’s a checkbox labeled “look up address when placing images on the map”; I tried clicking this, and got no results, but when the geotagging was done, address/location info was automatically entered for each photo’s Location metadata. You’ll have the option of selecting either “Minutes” or “Hours” for the variability in matching track time with photo time, and there’s also a slider that lets you fine-tune the time match. Other programs require you to enter an offset between local time and UTC, but Pro Photo Tools can apparently do that automatically. Once you click “Done”, coordinates will be assigned to all the photos, and pushpins plotted on the map view. Move the cursor over each pushpin to see a thumbnail for the image.

It’s important to remember that you have to tell the program to save the images with the new coordinate data and metadata (File => Save All Images with new data) If you exit with explicitly saving that data, it will be lost.

You can view the images in either the standard 2-D mode, or in VE’s 3-D mode:

5-17-2008-4.12.40 PM

You can also load in geotagged photos, display them in Virtual Earth, and edit them. Pro Photo Tools lets you create a track from these imported photos, but oddly doesn’t let you export this track in GPX or similar format; hopefully, that will be added soon. And you can’t create a KML or similar file from the photos, as many other geotagging programs can. But still, this is a solid geotagging program from Microsoft, and a big step up from Location Stamper. While it won’t replace GeoSetter in my toolbox, Pro Photo Tools EXIF editing capabilities and address lookup feature make it a useful complement.