Geotagging Photos

I've recently been Geotagging my photos on Flickr. (See my map)

I know I'm not the first to have thought of the combination of a Camera and GPS. This is even confirmed by the fact that my friend QuasiJones said he even thought of it a few years ago.

However, this morning I was going for walk through the park thinking about all of this and an idea came to me. For a while I had thought that it would be really nice to have Geocode data stored by my Canon 20D. The problem was how? Adding a GPS to a camera has many complications; including additional bulk, battery life, and signal reception. Bluetooth is another way to approach this. Bluetooth GPS receivers are readily available these days at reasonable prices. However, my experience with my other bluetooth devices suggests that getting the two to talk regularly and reliably will take more effort and time than I'm willing to spare these days. And probably lead to quite a few missed shots as well.

So how do you go about capturing location data for your shots in an easy, reliable way?

Then it came to me! What if you could use what you might already have? Your old fashioned GPS? For me this is my Garmin eTrex Vista. I recently went on an 8 day backpacking trip during which I had it on most of the time recording waypoints as track data. What if you synchronized the clock on your GPS and your camera and then at a later time correlated the information captured by both? You could then use the clock data to plot your pictures along the GPS track!

This idea has many positive attributes. It doesn't require additional hardware (assuming you already have a Camera and GPS). It will work with just about any camera and GPS (that record time data). And no additional configuration steps are required (except to synchronize the clocks and set the GPS to start keeping a track log, which mine does automatically whenever you turn it on.

I event went through all kinds of scenarions in my mind of how you could commercialize such a service. Upload your pictures, upload your GPS track log and have it done for you.

Unfortunately, as is usually the case, someone's beat me to it.

Today I read the following on Make:

Try http://www.gpstagr.com/. It allows the user to upload a track file saved from a GPS device, then use the track information to geotag flickr photos that are taken in the same time period as the track file. This is a lot easier than geotagging photos manually using flickr organizr, and more accurate, too.

Posted by: guyuan on September 22, 2006 at 11:38 PM

Well, at least it wasn't by long. :)