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Flickr GPS geocoding made simple

Thanks to Flickr it's finally easy to use geotagged photos. Alas, the workflow is still very clumsy for using a GPS to geotag. Here's what I came up with for Windows.

Get a GPS. Six months ago the Garmin Forerunner 301 was the smallest thing I could find with a USB interface. The newer Forerunner 205 looks good, as does this upcoming Sony thing.
Walk around with the GPS tracking your location and take some photos. Make sure the clocks on the GPS and the camera are synchronized.
Dump the GPS track log to a .gpx file. Garmin drivers are here. I couldn't find Garmin software to just write a GPX file, but get301tracks works. Or you can use RoboGeo to download and save GPX.
Run RoboGeo ($35). Follow the instructions for "3. From the tracklog in a GPX file". Pick your JPGs, then pick your GPX file, then click "Write the location data to the EXIF headers" to create new geotagged JPGs.
Tell Flickr to Import EXIF location data. It's a one time preference setting.
Upload your photos to Flickr via your usual method.

There's a much easier way to do all this inside RoboGeo. Just plug in your Garmin GPS, point it at your photos, and upload to Flickr. No messing with EXIF tags or GPX files or anything. But while that's admirable for its simplicitly it's totally the wrong thing for serious image management. You want the raw location on your hard drive so five years from now you can use it again.

The flaw in the above workflow is it doesn't put the geotag data in your raw image originals. RoboGeo supports DNG but not CR2. Ugh. Keep the GPX files around.

Alternative software: gpsPhoto.pl, grazer.

tech • photo
2006-09-02 19:42 Z


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