GeoTagging

Geotagging isn’t anything really new, been around a couple of years. According to Wikipedia "Geotagging is the process of adding geographical identification metadata to various media such as websites, RSS feeds, or images." Here I will explain a bit how you can geotag images.

There are some different tools that will help you to download a track from your GPS unit and synchronize it with the timestamp from images to set positioning data in the image. Then you can place those on Google Earth or on the Flickr Map.


Example from Stockholm with some geotagged photos.

But what I have not been able to find is a free piece of software that will use a GPS connected to a mobile phone and generate a track in GPX file that you can use to synchronize with images. So I wrote MogTrails. Now I’m looking for people who would like to give it a test to find bugs etc.

How to geotag your images

First make sure your camera and GPS is farely synchronized. At the moment MogTrails does not help you with this.

Install and start MogTrails on your phone.

Take a walk and take some photos.

Transfer both GPX file and photos to your computer.

Install a geotagging software. On Windows machines you can use Microsoft LocationStamper. On a Mac you can use PhotoGPSEditor. Another option both on PC and Mac is JPhotoGeoTagger. Other tools on Windows which I have not used include Microsoft Pro Photo Tools(which replaces LocationStamper), GeoSetter and RoboGeo. For Pro Photo Tools to work with RAW files you need to download the correct codec as well.

Tag your images!

Upload them to Flickr for instance but make sure Flickr use your GeoTags.(via)

Other useful tools

When geotagging photos it might be necessary to time-shift a large number of photos due to a time difference between the clock in the camera and the GPS. There are a number of tools that can do that. Though I have not yet found a free graphical user interface for doing it but both ExifTool by Phil Harvey and JHead are free command-line tools. I have only used JHead so far but ExifTool can manage many more file-formats than JHead.

If you need editing your GPX file GPX editor can be helpful but I'm still looking for a better GPX editor.