Geotagging

I have been wanting a good system for collecting geotagging information with my photos. For those of you who do not know what this is -- basically the idea is to embed GPS coordinates in your photos so that you can easily identify where they were taken. Photo software these days, like Picasa and iPhoto, will then plot where your photos are taken on maps.

There are cameras out there today that support hooking up GPS units and automatically embedding the coordinates in the photo. However, these are typically expensive digital SLR cameras (that cost >$1000 without lenses). It also requires you to connect the GPS unit to the camera (which just sounds annoying).

Today I was poking around the internet, and found some cool, simple software called gps2photo. Basically, you just need to carry a regular run-of-the mill gps unit with you (like the Garmin Etrex Venture HC which only costs ~$140) and collect a track-log as you go. After your trip, you export the track log and run the gps2photo script and it will automatically add the gps data to the photos. Now, this is just a perl script -- and probably not too "normal-person" friendly -- but for those of you who are not afraid of a bit of unix it seems great. The track-log solution is also not perfect, but seems pretty reasonable. The low-priced garmin GPS devices that I looked at seem to all have a may track log with 10,000 data points. So, if you are out and about for 8 hours you basically get a data point every 3 seconds. If you are going to be gone for 10 days, then you would have to dial it down to once every 30 seconds. With the expensive solution you would not have this sampling problem. Usually when I am in the backcountry, the difference in my location after 30 seconds does not really matter much :). And, when I am doing more urban site-seeing where I may be able to walk a meaningful distance in 30 seconds, I also tend to have my laptop with me so I could download the track-log on a daily basis.

I admit that I have not given it a shot yet, but look forward to doing so in the future.