Geotagging Photos

What's better then the joy of taking the perfect photo? How about knowing the exact location you took your photo? Okay, so maybe for some people it's easy to remember, but for me I need to take a hundred pictures to be happy with one, so it is very possible for me to forget where that photo was taken. Another example, four years ago I had an amazing couple of days on the island of Maui. Even after only four years, for a vacation that I dream of often, there are pictures that I have a general idea where they were taken, but it would be nice to know the exact spot. Once such location was Lindbergh's grave site which had this postcard view of the ocean. My past visit to Maui last month, I couldn't even find the spot to visit again and I had been there before! How sad is that? Enter the age of Geotagging photos or embedding the file with the exact latitude and longitude location of where that photo was taken.

Now there are many different ways to accomplish this trick. Those of you who do not have a GPS unit, Picasa and Flickr both allow you to drag your photo onto a map and give it a location. It definitely accomplishes giving your photo a location. That process is very time consuming, besides the obvious fact it's not very accurate.

In the future, there's no doubt cameras are going to have a GPS until built into them. The higher end cell phones have that feature now (like the Nokia N95 that I want). Other phones don't have the GPS unit built into the phone, but can use information from the cell towers themselves to give a fairly accurate location. Just like anything that incorporates more then one feature though, it's never as good as the product designed for that feature.

I just so happen to have a hand held GPS, the Garmin 60CSX. I do happen to use it primarily for GeoCaching (that's another blog for another time), but carrying it is almost seems secondary now. As long as it's on, it tracks everywhere I go. Turn it on, toss it in the camera back, and head out shooting for the day. After the day is done, save the tracks as a .gpx file using the Map Source software that comes with the GPS. Really it's nothing more then a text file with position, direction, speed, time, and altitude in it.

Half the battle is already won, my exact position is known at any give time. Now enter the data from the camera. Any time a picture is taken, the camera records the time. The only magic that has to happen is matching the two up. My favorite is GPicSync and it runs on Windows and Linux. Best part, it's open source and free. There are many options out there, I've tried a couple, but for me it doesn't get any easier then GPicSync, it just works well for me.

Matching the data from the GPS to the camera is the real trick, but even that is easy. In my case, my GPS always reports the correct time based on it's location and the data it is getting from the satellite signal. Now my camera (Canon 40D), has the correct time, but it has no idea what time zone it's in. GPicSync figures that between the GPS and the camera there will be a time discrepancy, enter this screen:

To fix the 5 hour difference because of the time zone, I add five hours to my GPS time, so that it will be matched to my camera. I'm lazy, I just know that there is a 5 hour difference, I could take the time to put real time both are displaying, but I've even streamlined this process.

Next it's just a matter of pointing the location of the photos I want geotagged and the location of my .gpx file with the GPS data. Here's a look of me ready to go on a run (click on the picture if you want to be able to read the text, then pick view all sizes, I know it's small):


Now it's just a matter of hitting the Sychronise button (again, click on the picture to see it larger):

In this batch, I tagged 164 files and it took about 4 minutes on my laptop. If you look closely at the screen GPicSync is set, by default, not to tag any photo with a difference of 300 seconds (5 minutes), notice that most only differed by less then 9 seconds (take my word for it, only the last three show, but most were 9 or less).

For your photos to display properly on Flickr after you tag and upload them, an added step is needed, visit here. Don't ask me why, but you need to tell Flickr it's alright to import the lat and log from the EXIF (information part of your picture). If you don't remember to do this, your pictures will have the information in the file, but Flickr will ignore it your pictures will not show when you look at the map.

Here's two photos on Flickr (once viewing, click on map in the lower right hand corner):



The same photos on Picasa (once viewing, click on "view album map" in the lower right corner) :



I dislike how both sites assume you want to look at the whole album at a time, it makes for a cluttered space. I don't have very many pictures, so I think you'll get the point.


Take the time to look at really zoom in close and set the map for the hybrid view. These pictures were taken at one of my favorite places, Meijer Gardens. From the view, you should be able to see the large green house and the main building. The purple tulips were taken out front and the yellow tulips were taken in back, in the Children's Park. Both sites are pretty darn accurate, but the edge goes to Flickr. Picasa (Google maps) seems to be off by about 15 feet east. That's hardly complaining, but it's interesting how the same data give slightly different results based on who you use.

That seems like a lot of information, but it really is quite easy. The hardest part of the whole process for me was figuring out my camera didn't have a time zone! Once I got past that, I've been geotagging ever since. It's a couple of extra steps, but I'm convinced that my Garmin 60CSX will read much more accurate in any kind of cover (if you dig in my albums, you'll find many pictures that were taken inside the building) then any camera with GPS built in.

If you really bored, check out my Maui 08 pictures. That link will open the map view of my album. With the exception of a couple of the underwater ones, every photo was geotagged on my trip. When I go back in four years, I WILL be able to find my favorite spots! :)