Geotagging Photos

I love taking photos – tens of thousands of photos – and now I am pleased that I can also geotag the new ones.

Garmin Forerunner 305 GPS watch

I have borrowed the Christmas present that I gave to my wife in 2008 to do this. Its a Garmin Forerunner 305. The process is mostly straightforward:

• Make sure the batteries in the camera and watch are charged; also be sure that you have a memory card in your camera!
• Set the time shown on the camera to that displayed on the watch.
• Put on the watch and let it find itself (“locating satellites”)
• Press the Start button on the watch
• Go out and take pictures
• Back at home, put the watch in its USB / charging cradle and watch the Garmin Training Center® software on your computer download the data files from it
• Find that data file (shown in bottom left corner of the training centre software) and right-click on it, and choose export
• Save that data file to a directory of your choosing, e.g. My Documents/My GPS Locations
• Download your pictures from your camera to your computer
• Start up the free program called Geosetter and go to the directory where you saved your pictures, then…
• Highlight all the pictures that you just took
• Click the little map icon which pops up with the message “synchronise geo data of selected images with GPS data files”, or press Ctrl-G
• A large dialog box will appear, it has the title “Synchronize with GPS Data Files”
• Choose the second option, “Synchronize with a Directory containing Data Files” and make sure the directory stated there is the one where you exported your GPS files to (e.g. My Documents/My GPS Locations) and press Ok
• Geosetter will match up the photos with the times of GPS points recorded by the watch and prepare to store the location information in each photo – the border around each photo will turn red
• You must now click the disk icon to save all that geotagging data into the pictures – the photo’s border will turn yellow as each photo is saved with the geotag (for techies: it stores it as EXIF data)
• Now, you can use a free program like Picasa to touch up the photo – and you will see a small world icon at the bottom right of Picasa which indicates that it is geotagged.  Note: Picasa has a known bug in it where it mucks up the “MakerNotes” EXIF data put in jpegs by certain cameras, like Canaon EOS450D – it appears to just affect the camera maker info, not the geotagged data.  So, always geotag your photos first, before using Picasa

More and more places on the web are collecting photos of specific places and either combining them like PhotoSynth to show a place from multiple angels, or plunking them on a map like Google Earth or GeoGraph.

If you look up Whitchurch, Hampshire on Google Maps, then you’ll spot a few of my photos and perhaps even a video or two, just look for my userid ‘AndrewRH’.

And while looking at a Google Map, have a look for the little man icon at the top of the + – zoom slider – if it is coloured in then you may be able to see a ‘street view‘ at that location.

Map of Whitchurch showing AndrewRH’s photo of Bell pub.