Exploring the world of free tools for GIS, GPS, Google Earth, neogeography, and more.
Adobe has released a free plug-in for applications in their Creative Suite 5 (CS5) (e.g. Photoshop, Illustrator) that adds a “GPS” tab to the info window:
It doesn’t do a lot, just display an image’s embedded geotagging information in it, but it’s better than nothing. Available for both Windows and Mac.
Been a while since I last posted about Prune (version 6) (earlier posts about versions three and four), a GPS data manager, visualizer and photo geotagger. It’s Java-based, so it runs in Windows, Mac and Linux, not a common trait with GPS software. Just checked the website, and discoverd that Prune is at version 10 (!), and has progressively added features with every version. Current feature set (from the website) includes:
Screenshot (with 3D track window open):
You’ll need to have Java installed on your system just to run the program. But full functionality requires download and installation of a number of needed software packages, as described on the “Dependencies” page; all are free and available for all OS platforms.
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.
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:
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:
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 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:
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.
The Java-based GPS and geotagging application Prune, covered in earlier posts, has been updated to version 6.0. New features include:
(You may have to turn off the firewall in Windows to get this to work)
Full support for all its features requires downloading of the Java3D library, exiftool, and GPSBabel.
In the lower left-hand corner of Google Earth, there’s a latitude/longitude readout that shows the position at the cursor position:
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:
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:
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 difficult. Fixed 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:
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 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).
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.
