Geo mapping your images

Submitted by nedo on 30 September 2010 - 7:19pm

GPS Geo-mapping your images
September 30th, 2010 Nedo Leave a comment Go to comments

When your main interest in photography is taking pictures of (urban) landscapes and other cultures, chances are that you’re doing a lot of traveling. While traveling you make a lot of pictures and you don’t always remember where you’ve made what picture. Keeping track of where you made what picture proofs to be quite a hassle sometimes.

To help you remember where you’ve taken your pictures you can use a GPS Geo-tagger. Some Geo-tag devices add GPS coordinates to the EXIF data of your images while you shoot, like the Nikon GP-1 GPS Tracker. However, I’m Canon shooter a no such devices are available for my EOS 5D Mark II. Well, at least not that I’m aware of.

Another option would be to buy a simple GPS device, like the Jobo Photo GPS Geo-Imaging 4, which attaches to your camera (often the hot shoe). It then captures GPS data for every picture you take and stores it in it’s memory. You can then download your pictures from you SD or CF card and download the matching GPS data from the GPS device. These GPS devices come with special software which enables you to combine your pictures and GPS data and put the GPS data in your EXIF metadata in the right picture file. But, of course, as always these devices come with software designed for Windows or Mac only. As always Linux users are left out. Which is a shame. Manufacturers of these GPS devices can make a lot of money by creating software that also works on Linux, because the number of Linux users is growing rapidly.

So, if you can’t get a GPS Geo-tagger for your camera and you can’t use the software delivered by the simple GPS devices, what can you use? What options do you have in geo-tagging (sometimes referred to as geo-mapping) your images?

Well, I’ve been doing a little research and the best solution seems to be to carry around a GPS device and turn it on the moment you leave the house/hotel/tent/whatever. Make sure that the internal clock of the GPS device is well synchronized with the clock on your camera. Afterwards you can use Open Source Software to combine your GPS data with your pictures. It’s sounds a lot like just using the Jobo Photo GPS Geo-Imaging 4, but it isn’t. You can basically use any GPS device you like. Just make sure that it saves coordinates in GPX format or otherwise you need to convert into that.

GPScorrelate
Once you have made your pictures and the GPS device was switched on at that time, you can use the Open Source software of GPScorrelate to put GPS data in your EXIF. Each picture you take has a timestamp. These timestamps are then correlated against the GPS coordinates on your GPS device with the exact same timestamp.

Since I’m not sure how and in what format Jobo put’s it’s GPS data (they won’t tell me), I can not say whether this device is also a GPS device that you can use. Even when it’s just for recording your GPS coordinates.

Please keep in mind that I’m not an expert on this subject. I just did a little research on the matter.

Converting other GPS data:
When you use a GPS devices that doesn’t use the GPX format your GPS data is not entirely useless. Often you can convert the data by using the Open Source software of GPSbabel.

Screenshot: (opens in a new window)

Resources:
http://freefoote.dview.net/linux_gpscorr.html