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 Location Stamper uses Microsoft’s MapPoint maps in the display, which are already out-of-date, and I said it would be nice if they could add Virtual Earth to the app but wasn’t holding my breath.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:
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.
- Activity Workshop writes to say that his multi-platform GPS track management and photo geotagging application Prune has been updated (see earlier Prune posts here and here). New features include:
- New map window in the View menu, showing points overlaid on OpenStreetMap images
- New function to launch a browser showing the area in either Google Maps or OpenStreetMap
- Handling of track segments, including loading, saving and exporting, and preservation during edit and undo
- New function to merge track segments for the current selection, to make one single segment
- Display of current and average speed on details panel
- Status bar showing confirmation of actions
- Much improved French texts thanks to generous user input
Written in Java, and runs on Windows, Mac and Linux
- Need to geotag a photo, but don’t have an application like Prune, GeoSetter or GPicSync handy? You can do it online using the Sunday Morning Rides GeoTag utility. Specify the location in a Google Maps interface, set the coordinates, upload the image (JPG only), and a minute or so later you’ll see the geotagged image (or part of it) on the web page. Then right-click on the image and save it to your computer. Even though you may only see part of the image on-screen, it does tag and save the entire image, apparently losslessly. Sunday Morning Rides also has an online GPX track builder and waypoint utility.
In the comments to my post on GeoSetter, someone suggested I take a look at GPSed Photo Take’n'Pin as an option for geotagging photos. GPSed itself is a service for uploading and sharing GPS track and point data. From the website’s FAQ:
GPSed, a location-based and geotagging service, is designed to enable real-time tracking from mobile devices and collecting track data in an online archive.
The service is designated for hikers, bikers, drivers, tourists, adventure travelers, sportsmen, photographers and GPS/GIS professionals working in various industries such as forestry, fishery, transportation and others. GPSed can also be used just for having fun.
GPSed Photo Take’n'Pin is their free application designed to use GPS track data to geotag photos. Gave it a spin, and wasn’t terribly impressed:
- You apparently can’t use a local GPX track file on your computer to geotag the photos, only one that you’ve already upload to the GPSed website. Since you likely already have that track on your computer, there’s no reason not to use a better geotagging program that supports local GPX files like GeoSetter. By way of contrast, the similar service locr provides a free application that does let you use your own GPS data to geotag your photos.
- I say “apparently” above because I couldn’t get the program to geotag my standard test photoset even with an online track, and there’s no help file in either the program or the website to help me sort out what the problem might be.
- Even if I could successfully geotag a photo with the GPSed Take’n'Pin application, there’s nothing I can do with it on the GPSed website. You can take the photos and export them to Google Earth, Picasa, or Flickr, but you don’t need this program to do that. With locr, you can upload the photo to the website and share it and its location with others.
- The program crashed on me several times (I’ll cut it some slack on that, since it’s labeled as a beta).
Given those issues, I’ll stick with my previous statement that GeoSetter is the best geotagging application I’ve seen to date, with GPicSync a worthy alternative. Even if GPSed Photo Take’n'Pin worked as advertised, it doesn’t offer any features to make it worthwhile.
Published at April 22, 2008
in GPS and Garmin.
Garmin handheld GPS units use vector graphics to display imagery, so it’s generally been considered impossible to view raster imagery on them, like USGS topo maps or aerial photographs. But I’ve figured out a way, and created a program that lets you convert free USGS topo maps downloaded from the Seamless Server, black-and-white DOQQs, color satellite imagery, any georeferenced raster imagery, to a Garmin-compatible format: Moagu - the Mother Of All GPS Utilities. Rich Owings has the first review at GPS Tracklog (he likes it!).
Here’s a few screenshots from my Garmin 60Cx:
You can download a demo version
at the website. Introductory price is $19.95.
Published at April 18, 2008
in GPS and Garmin.
POILoader: A long and involved post of mine from a few weeks back described methods for managing multiple custom POI files on a Garmin GPS, to get around the limitation that POILoader erased the current POI set when uploading a new one. The process was mildly painful, involving going into the GPS’s memory, then copying and renaming the *.gpi POI files to prevent them from being erased; I refer you to that post for the gory details. The latest version of the POILoader makes this process a lot simpler: you now have the option of saving the *.gpi files directly on your computer, where you can rename and manage them directly before copying them into the /Garmin/POI directory on your GPS unit. A lot easier.
Curiously, there’s one additional option in the program, which lets you install the POIs into Garmin’s MapSource program under a specific name. It’s curious because there’s no current support in MapSource for POI uploading; I’d look for that capability in an upcoming release.
DNRGarmin: In comments on this post, Thomas notes that the bug that kept USB connectivity in DNRGarmin non-functional unless you installed with administrator rights has been fixed; it now works with any installation. If you have a Garmin handheld GPS, the latest version of DNRGarmin is a must. You can upload data from GPX, Google Earth’s KML format, text, DBF and shapefile to your Garmin using this program, and conversely save data from your GPS in these formats; it can even re-project data in UTM, Lambert, etc. to geographic coordinates for. Even if you don’t have a Garmin, it’s a handy program to have for converting from one format to another.
Dan Bloomberg wrote to tell me of his new website, the GPS File Depot. Some useful stuff for GPS users, especially Garmin owners:
Published at April 11, 2008
in GPS and Garmin.
Last week, I posted on how to convert a point shapefile to a Garmin custom POI file, and how with some manipulation you could include a fair number of the shapefile attributes in that POI’s data screen. But with only 6 lines of dataspace available, and only about 20 or so characters per line, you can only fit so much data onto a single data screen before you run out of space. And there may be times when you need to fit in more data.
The solution is pretty straightforward - just create another set of data for the same set of POIs, and give this new dataset a different name. It’s easy to access this new dataset using standard POI database management; you can make it even easier to distinguish between different datasets by modifying the point name slightly, appending a letter or number to every POI name in the new dataset, distinguishing it from other datasets with the same name. Using this technique, and using a Garmin that takes external data cards, there’s virtually no limit to the amount of attribute data you can include for every point in a shapefile.
Published at April 4, 2008
in GPS and Garmin.
Garmin POIs (Points of Interest) datafiles can contain up to two lines of text data for the name, and up to four lines of data for the description, far more than the more limited space for the same data in a GPS waypoint. This gives you enough room to include at least some of a point shapefile’s tabular attribute data for a location, and take it into the field with you for reference. And while there’s typically a limit of 500 to 1000 waypoints on many Garmin GPS units, you can put tens of thousands of locations into a POI file, along with that associated data. Here’s one way to create Garmin POI files from a point shapefile, though you could use comparable tabular data as well.
Continue reading ‘Creating A Garmin GPS Points Of Interest (POI) File From A Point Shapefile’
