Exploring the world of free tools for GIS, GPS, Google Earth, neogeography, and more.
Prune is another Java-based GPS tool with its own unique set of features, including:
- Load multiple text, GPX or KML tracks, appending them to each other
- Trim duplicate points, and compress the track (hence the name Prune)
- Save combined tracks in text or KML format (use GPS TrackMaker to convert the KML tracks to GPX format if desired)
- See a plot of position, and altitude if available
Continue reading ‘Prune – Java-Based GPS Track Visualization And Photo GeoTagging’
The last photo geotagging application I’ll cover for now is GPicSync, freeware from Francois Schnell. This application doesn’t have as fancy an interface as PhotoMapper, locr or Location Stamper, but it has some useful, and unique, features:
Thanks, Francois!
5/2/2009: Apparently no longer available. Check out Microsoft’s new geotagging program, or the geotagging category at right for more option
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.
In yesterday’s post, I talked about locr, a free program for geotagging photos both manually and with GPS data. One of its quirks is that while locr does successfully insert geodata into the EXIF header, Picasa is unable to read that data because the GPSVersionID tag written by locr isn’t properly recognized by Picasa. I don’t know whether that’s an locr problem or a Picasa problem, though I suspect the latter. There’s a command-line utility called EXIFTool that can re-write the GPSVersionID tag to one that Picasa will recognize, and I gave the command-line expression to use in yesterday’s post:
exiftool -GPSVersionID=0.0.2.2 -overwrite_original *.jpg
But I’m not a big fan of command-line utilities, so I’ve whipped up a quick GUI that will do the same thing called EXIFTool GPSVersionID Fixer. Download and unzip this GUI program into the same directory that has the utility exiftool.exe (renamed from exiftool(-k).exe, the name it has in the zip archive), then run it:
Select the folder that contains the JPG files geotagged by locr (or any other geotagging problem that’s giving Picasa problems), then click on the Execute button and you’re done. If the folder contains both tagged and untagged photos, that won’t cause any problems. Not a lot of error-checking, but it will flag you if you haven’t selected a directory.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t fix this problem for photos geotagged by PhotoMapper. But it’s worth a try for files geotagged by any other program that Picasa (and possibly other programs) might be having a problem recognizing.
Addendum: Mike Lee points out that you don’t need to have EXIFtool in the same directory as EXIFTool GPSVersionID Fixer; you can also put it into any directory specified in the Path command loaded when Windows starts up. That typically includes the Windows directory (e.g. c:\Windows) and the Windows\system32 directory. Thanks, Mike!
9/3/08: Markus Grohl pointed out that with my utility, EXIFTool overwriting the photo’s original date and time with the current date and time, which really isn’t desirable. I’ve fixed the utility so that the original date and time are preserved. Markus also reports that the beta 3.0 version of Picasa no longer has an issue with anomalous GPSVersionID tags, so that you may not even need to use this utility anymore. Thanks, Markus!
Other free utilities can be found on the Utilities page. If you find this or any of my other utilities particularly useful and would like to show your appreciation, donations of any amount are gratefully accepted via PayPal.
Locr is a web album site oriented around geographic location, where you can upload geotagged photos, share them, and have them display in an album or on a map interface. Basic accounts are free, and while I assume that premium accounts will be available for a price at some point, I can’t seem to find any mention of that on the site. Geotagging can be done with separate software called “locr GPS Photo”; the software is free, and available for download even without registering for the site. Make sure you download the PDF manual as well, as you’ll probably need it. You can either manually geotag a photo using a Google Maps interface, or use GPS data to assign geotags. Here’s the basic interface:
The software does work, but it’s not without quirks, particularly for automatic geotagging with GPS data.
1. One of the biggest pains of locr is that it doesn’t accept standard GPX files for geotagging – it requires nmea files. You can convert GPX to nmea using GPSBabel, and the following procedure from the help file:
Converting gpx file into nmea format
Make sure you have the latest version of GPSBabel and the GPSBabelGUI. And be prepared for problems. In particular, if any of your GPX trackpoints don’t have a timestamp, GPSBabel won’t be able to create the nmea file, and will generate an error message. You’ll have to open the GPX file in a text editor, manually delete the trackpoints with no timestamp, then save the file as a new GPX file before using GPSBabel to convert it to the nmea format. Hopefully, locr will recognize the need to accept the standard GPX format in their program, and add it as an option sometime soon.
2. Sometimes, it won’t tag a photo in a series; if that happens, click on the “Clear EXIF location tags”, and that may be enough to get it to work.
3. The geographic location is written in the EXIF tag, but some programs (like Picasa) can’t read EXIF tags modified by locr. 9/3/08: I’ve heard this is no longer an issue. The problem apparently results from a problem that Picasa has reading the GPSVersionTag created by locr. There’s a fix for this: download EXIFTool, a free command-line utility for EXIF tags, re-name the executable file to exiftool.exe, copy it to the directory with the photos in it, and from the command line execute the following command:
exiftool -GPSVersionID=0.0.2.2 -overwrite_original *.jpg
This will re-write the GPSVersionID tag to one that Picasa recognizes, and Picasa will then pick up the geotagging information in those photos.
Addendum: Check this follow-up post for a GUI for EXIFTool.
On the plus side, manual photo geotagging is fairly painless – zoom in to the area in a Google Maps interface, select the photo, and click on the “Manual geotagging” button to tag it. You can also enter an address into a search box, and have that be automatically geocoded for you. You can then move the marker manually after the initial tagging to fine-tune its position. Select a group of photos that have been geotagged, and click on the “Show photos on map” button, and their positions will be indicated on the Google Map. You can also select a set of photos, and create a KML file of thumbnails for display in Google Earth with the push of a button.
If locr would accept GPX files, not have the occasional tagging glitch, and write the GPSVersionID tag properly, it would be pretty awesome. Even with those faults, though, locr is still pretty good, especially at the price.
There are a fair number of programs that not only embed geographic data from a GPS file into a photo’s EXIF header, but also have a host of other features as well. While I’ll be posting about some of those shortly, I thought I’d start out with two more modest programs that don’t do much more than geotag the photos.
More after the fold …
Continue reading ‘GPS Photo GeoTagging I – Two Simple Solutions’
Using Picasa, PicasaWeb or iTag to geotag your photos through Google Earth (or Google Maps) is fine for the occasional photo, or for photos from the past where you don’t have specific location data, i.e. latitude and longitude. But if you’re going to be geotagging a lot of photos in the future, doing it manually will turn into a chore very quickly. There’s a way to simplify that task: Take location data from a GPS unit, and then embed it into your photo’s EXIF header or IPTC tags with software that automates the process. There are a lot of free and cheap programs that let you do that, and I’ll be covering many of the Windows options in upcoming posts. First, though, I want to go over some of the basics of equipment and data.
Equipment: Some day, most cameras may come with GPS capabilities built-in, so that they can automatically geotag your photos as you take them. But I’ve heard of only two cameras with built-in GPS released to date: the Navman iCN750 (discontinued), and the Ricoh Pro G3 GPS Camera, a two-year-old 3-megapixel model. So for now, the only reasonable choice is to use a handheld GPS receiver that can log your position continuously as a function of time, save that data, and then upload it to your computer (typically in GPX format).
Most handheld GPS units can do all of this, with the cheapest units running less than a hundred dollars. If you don’t need a large, handheld GPS receiver with all its features (data screen, input, maps, etc.), another option is to buy a simple GPS datalogger, like the Sony GPSCS1KA or Sony GPS-CS1
Data: You need to have both position and time data stored by the GPS units in order to geotag the photos,. The position data is obviously needed for the geotagging, but the time data plays a critical part as well. The software programs that I’ll be posting about match up the time you take your photo with the location the GPS data says you were at for that time, and then embed that time-specific location data in the photographs. Dataloggers will normally save both the location and time together automatically, but handheld GPS units may require you to specify that both time and position data be recorded in a GPS tracklog. Handheld units often let you specify whether your position is recorded continuously based on distance, time, or some combination of the two.
There’s another catch: some GPS units (like my Garmin) strip out the time data if you save the track in a separate tracklog, separate from the active track. So if you save a track in these units, make sure you don’t clear out the active track as well, or else you’ll have no way to synchronize your position with the time you took a photo. Found this out rather annoyingly after having taken a whole bunch of photos, saving the track, and then discovering that all the time data was gone. The newer Garmin x-series models let you log time and position data continuously to a GPX file on their microSD memory cards, bypassing the need to manage track data completely (and letting you record literally months worth of position and time data on a single microSD card).
You should also check to make sure that your camera is set to the same time as your GPS unit; if the camera’s time is off, or in a different time zone, that can complicate the process of matching up the GPS track time with the time the photo was taken. Many programs come with the ability to adjust for such a time difference, but it will make life a lot easier if you make sure they’re in time synch right from the start. GPS track times are recorded in UTC (aka Greenwich Mean Time), and while most programs can correct for the difference, some have problems with that correction.
Uploading the data to your computer from your GPS is usually straightforward; if the software that came with your GPS can’t take track data and save it in GPX format, a free program like EasyGPS or GPS TrackMaker does a great job.
Summing up: to automate geotagging your photos with GPS, you’ll need a GPS receiver that can log both your position and time on a continuous basis, and then upload the data to your computer in GPX format, where it can be synchronized with your photos based on time.
Ogle Earth has done posts on using Picasa to geotag (aka geocode) photos in both the stand-alone version of Picasa, and online in PicasaWeb albums. There are a fair number of other stand-alone programs for geotagging photos in a wide variety of ways, many of which include other useful features (like inserting the photos into Google Earth or Google Maps). Over the next few weeks, I plan to review a fair number of these programs on this blog.
First up is iTag, an IPTC tag installer. Its principal function is to add title, description and keyword tags to photos, but it does have some geotagging capabilities. iTag opens entire folders with pictures, and displays their contents in thumbnail format:
If your photos are already geocoded, iTag can create placemarks with a photo thumbnail bubble in Google Earth, though this can take a while depending on how large the photo size is:
You can save the placemark from Google Earth, but iTag also lets you create a KMZ file with the photo (or photos) embedded directly in the file, or linked to an internal or external location.
Geotagging a photo or group of photos is a multi-step process. You need to first create a placemark at the desired location in Google Earth. iTag’s default geotagging process is to take KML placemark data copied into the Window’s clipboard (right-click on the placemark and choose Copy), and use the geographic data embedded in that to geotag the photos. You also have the option of using a saved KML placemark file to geotag the photos. I prefer Picasa’s method of geocoding the position directly in Google Earth by selecting the photo in Picasa and then choosing the position with a cursor in Google Earth, but there may be occasions when iTag’s placemark process might be more convenient.
iTag lets you copy EXIF GPS data to the IPTC tags and vice versa, and also erase the geographic data completely from the photo. It also can convert GPX waypoint files to KML, so that you can use individual GPS points to geotag your pictures (but there are better ways to do this that will be covered in future posts).
iTag is a convenient way to apply descriptive tags and keywords to a photo or group of photos, better than the Picasa IMO because that’s all it does. The geotagging capabilities are a convenient bonus, but here I think Picasa is easier to use in most (if not all) cases.
