Even before we started geocaching as a hobby, I have liked the idea of geolocating our photos in Flickr. I try to do it when I can, but even with Flickr's mapping features it can be a time consuming task. Now that we are geocaching and have invested in a handheld GPS unit, I've discovered a few neat tools for automatically geotagging images using tracking data from our GPS. Of course, I'm not saying that managing our pictures isn't already a full time job, but some of these tools do take the tediousness out of the process and I'm more likely to tag and geotag our images from now on.
We tend to take most of our pictures while out geocaching anymore. That's not to say non-geocachers can't do this, you would just need a handheld GPS unit with tracking turned on while you're out taking pictures. Naturally ours is usually turned on since we're hunting geocaches, but I would certainly consider taking ours along with us if we were sightseeing somewhere and I wanted to save our locations to our photos. I will add some of my favorite geocaching tools to the end for anybody interested, and show a few examples of how I've been using the data and pictures that we do have.
There is unfortunately no one size fits all option for some of these steps, and many of the tools I use might not be preferred by everybody, but here's a breakdown of some of the applications I find most helpful.
Transfer Images to the Computer
It doesn't matter what program you use for this, I use the software that came with my camera because I like that way it handles file renaming when I export them to my Pictures folder. It's easiest to work with the images in the process when they're saved in a separate folder, so I do recommend that.
Download Track Data from GPS
This depends on your GPS receiver. We have Garmin so we use MapSource. Just make sure that you use the .gpx extension when you go to save the file. One track file may contain several tracks due to lost satellite signals and/or turning on and off the unit. Sometimes we have several days' worth of tracks stored on the unit. I don't like to keep the track data on my GPS if I can help it either. We have an upgraded memory card in it (about a gig), but if you have a lot of tracks stored and the GPS runs out of space, it will rewrite over your older tracks, losing all of your previous data. I also don't sit down and geotag my photos right away so when I take the files off the GPS, I will be sure to name the file with a date range of the tracks stored in that file so it's easy to find which one corresponds to set of photos we have.
This program is the best I could find for matching up GPS data with images, but it took me a long time to realize it was working. It is kinda glitchy, but quite simply you load your pictures into the application, then you load your .gpx file with your tracks, hit "apply tracks", and it will save geotags to your images. It does save the data in the actual image file, so it changes the image. It is probably a good idea to backup your images before you do this if you want don't want this information saved to your originals. It's quite simple how it works, but it matches the timestamp on your images to the timestamp on the track file. I forgot to mention this at first, but it's a good idea to synchronize your camera time to your GPS before you start. It will make the coordinates on your images more accurate.
Now the glitchy part is this. If you're using Picasa to manage your photos (which I'll get to later), Picasa will not recognize there are geotags associated with the image. But the geotags are saved on them. Today I discovered that if I load the photos into iTag (which I will also get to later), add a few tags and save the images, Picasa will now recognize the geotags. I like to work with tagging my images after I've worked with them in Picasa first so I'll come back to iTag later. iTag doesn't let you save images that you haven't tagged up in the application so I add some quick ones to ungray the save button and then do more specific tagging with the program later.
Picasa is just great, but there's some features on there that I've grown to love. You can geotag images using Picasa and Google Earth, but it's the one at a time sort of thing that I've always done before, which is why I've been using the Location Stamper application first. Once I have geotags correctly stamped on the images though, I use Picasa to export my images to a .kmz file. I use this file, in conjunction with another geocaching file to display my geocaches and photos in another .kmz file that I will create later. Letting Picasa do all the work is really nice though. I don't usually export the images until I have them fine tuned and captioned. At this point I tend to go back and forth between Picasa and iTag. When I'm ready to upload my pictures to Flickr, there is even a wonderful Picasa to Flickr plugin called picasa2flickr. It's not flashy but it really works! I wait until I'm done tagging my images with iTag before I finish uploading everything to Flickr using the plugin.
I find the process of tagging images in Flickr to be equally tedious, but iTag has become an almost must have photo tool for me. iTag supports geotagging and adding title and descriptions to your images, but I tend to only use it for tagging. Picasa captions end up in the description field in iTag, but if you move them you lose them when you export to Flickr anyway so I keep them where they are. With iTag I can select multiple images to apply tags to, or just tag images individually. It works much more intuitively than adding tags through Flickr's interface, and it's a heck of a lot quicker. The tags are embedded in your photo data and they will be there when you upload to Flickr (even if you use Picasa to upload).
A note about uploading captioned photos from Picasa to Flickr; the captions you add in Picasa will appear in the Description field on your Flickr account. This is where I use the batch editing in Flickr to copy and paste them into the title fields. Then if I want to add descriptions to my photos I will do it individually using the Flickr interface. I haven't really found a consistent way to do it with any of the other tools I've mentioned so far unfortunately.
This is probably enough if you're interested in simply geotagging your photos, but if you're also interested in geocaching, here are a few cool programs to check out:
GSAK (Geocaching Swiss Army Knife)
GSAK will come in most handy on our camping trip, since we'll mostly have offline access to our computers. Without going into too many details of what GSAK can do ('cause it can do losts) I load our finds on there and then sort by date to export a specific day's worth of geocaches to a single .gpx file. If you're a geocacher, you must download this program. You can also get the same results by creating a bookmark file at geocaching.com of the geocaches you want and downloading those to a .gpx.
This is a simple executable file that allows you to take the .gpx you just got from GSAK, drag it on top of the open application and it will create an automatic .kml of those geocaches that you can open in Google Earth. What's awesome about it is that it will use official geocaching icons and save the geocache data so beautifully that it probably would take you forever to do this on your own. It even has links to the waypoint on geocaching.com automatically embedded.
Of course who doesn't know all the yummy goodness included in Google Earth. It rocks! I will use Google Earth to combine my photo file I created before and my geocache file that I just created into one file to show both the geocaches we visited and the images we took. It's really a matter of dragging and dropping the folders and saving everything into a new .kml.
So what can you do with all of this stuff?
Of course uploading to Flickr is a breeze, but if you want to display your images on a map, you can use Google Maps. The new .kml that you just created has to be stored on the web somewhere. I've been keeping mine on my Google Pages account, but anyplace that allows you to get to the file by using a direct URL will work. Once you have that URL all you do is type that into the Google Maps search box and it will load all of data into a Google Maps page.
Check out one that I did from our most recent geocaching day (it was a small one, only 5 caches):
An early file with some tracks and annotations are here. Note that this one did take me a long time to create, but I did roughly use the same process (yes it is a bit busy, but I was just playing around):
One note about the conversion from the Google Earth .kmz to the Google Maps one is that all of your displayed waypoints on the left side of the page automatically become alphabetized on the lists. I do take some time now to add the numbers to the waypoint titles in Google Earth to keep them displayed in a certain order. There's a lot you can do in Google Earth with your original file, the possibilities of what you can display using Google Maps can be endless.
The extra steps to add points to maps can be a bit time consuming, but it has been a fun process to learn the capabilities of these programs together. Whether I keep it up will depend on the time I want to continue to devote to it.
Technorati Tags:geotagging, photos, images, flickr, geocaching, photography, wwmx, wwmx location stamper, location stamper, gpx, picasa, picasa2flickr, itag, gsak, googleearthtweaker, google earth, google maps
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