Picture geotagging solution

I don't know if you've noticed, but I don't always geotag all of my pictures. There are several reasons for that. Sometimes I've just forgotten exactly where I was when I took it. Sometimes I can't tell by looking at the map where I was. Sometimes (especially near the Superstition Mountains), Google Earth is low resolution and I can't tell where the trail is, much less where I was. Sometimes I stop in the shade somewhere and sit down and get my GPS receiver out and take a picture of it so I'll know where I was when I took the pictures at that spot. Anyway, I've had a lot of pictures that weren't geotagged or were not tagged with the correct position. I finally have a solution, though. It's called an i-gotU GT-120 GPS Travel Logger.

As you can see, I have it on the strap to my Rebel right now. I think I'll move it as soon as I think of a better place to carry it. It's a little inconvenient right there. It's small enough that I could put it just about anywhere. When I look at it, I think about the first GPS receiver I ever saw back in '78. That one was about 3 feet long, 2 feet wide, 1.5 feet high, weighed over 150 pounds, and the cooling fans screamed like banshees.

I went for a quick hike out at the end of Meridian road today to try out the logger. I was taking pictures just to take pictures. I didn't do any editing, and I put all of them on the web album, so don't be shocked. The purpose is to show how nifty the logger is. I could have refined the position of some of the pictures. Normal GPS error shows some of them having been taken a few feet off the trail when I know I was on the trail. Still, the accuracy will be much better than my guesswork in the low resolution areas.

The logger comes with software that can use the GPS track to geotag pictures. This time I used Microsoft Pro Photo Tools because it will allow you to shift you pictures with respect to the track if you don't have your camera time set correctly. I must have had the camera clock dead on, though; didn't have to adjust the time at all.

The logger software will also generate some kind of travel log with pictures to put on the web. I'll have to experiment with that. Sounds like it might be nifty. I noticed today, though, that you can view Picasa web album pictures on a map and "play" the pictures in sequence, so that you can see the pictures and where they were taken on a reasonably sized map. You can try it out with this album.

Meridian_2008_10_27