Wow – May is over as is my vacation 
Tempus fugit.
But of course I used the vacation for quite some photography, and also continued my engagement with geotagging. On our one week trip to beautiful Tuscany I had made sure to carry my Garmin Venture HC with my nearly all the time, switched on and set to record my track.
Now I downloaded and cleaned up the track just as I outlined in my previous post on geotagging, and will explain how to get the GPS information into the EXIF data of the photos!
After some searching and trial of various software packages for this, most namely the freely available gpicsync and a trial version of the commercial RoboGeo, I have settled for the also freely available GeoSetter software.
When you start up GeoSetter, the default view shows you the image browser on the left hand side, and a map window on the right hand side. This is not the optimal setup for what we are trying to achieve, so I changed my view setup by turning off the Map (for now) using CTRL-M or the respective menu entry in the View… menu, and turn on the tracks window using CTRL-T or again the menu item for this.
Now you need to locate the two data items you want to merge: In my case, I did:
- Browse to the directory on my hard disk where all JPEG images from Tuscany reside using the Explorer-like address bar. If you do this correctly, the thumbnails of your to-be-geotagged photos will appear, and the preview window will show a bigger version of the first photo.
- Use the Tracks window to browse to and open the GPX file with the positional track information created in the previously outlined process. You can additionally use the little checkboxes in the tracks window to turn off older waypoints or anonymous track information that you do not want to be used for geotagging. In my case, there were older waypoints in the GPS device I had used to relocate my favorite restaurants from my prior visits to Tuscany
So here is a screenshot of GeoSetter after I opened the two data locations:
- Remember my comment on making sure to synchronize the clocks between the GPS and the camera? Finally, this time I had remembered to do this by taking a photo of my GPS device while it is showing a second-accurate current time. We’ll be using this photo shortly.
- Now I was ready to perform the real geotagging: Starting with one picture first for the cautious, or do a CTRL-A in the thumbnail view to select all photos, and press CTRL-G or call the respective menu item Images… Synchronize with GPS data file… to open up the synchronization dialog. This will take a while to show up if you do it like I did with 897 images in one run, but GeoSetter is showing a nice progress bar while it retrieves the EXIF information from all the selected images.
- Now, this dialog is quite a beast, but don’t worry, I’ll walk you through it. What I did:
- Selected Synchronize with Visible Tracks as we had already located the positional data we will be using.
- Let GeoSetter Interpolate Regarding Shoot Time With Last Or Next Position, as this can improve accuracy of Geo information when the track log was not that dense (contained many data points).
- Allowed for a maximum time difference of, let’s say, 3600 seconds. If I stayed longer that that in one place, I might have left the GPS at home
- Used the Use Time Zone method, as I knew my camera’s time zone (no jetlag going from Germany to Italy – how convenient!), and this is the only method that will allow for the picture of the GPS device to be loaded
- Disabled the Request Time Zone checkbox as I knew the time zone – I rather selected the correct one in the combo box available for this.
- Checked the Add Time Zone over to Taken Date check box to have GeoSetter add the time zone information to the EXIF shooting data so the information is in there once and for all.
- And used the Additional Time Adjustment Method as described in the following paragraph!
So I clicked on the Adjust by Image Content… button and simply enter the time displayed on the GPS device in your photo of it into the edit fields – in my case, this led to a time correction of my camera’s time by -54 seconds. Not dramatic, but it helps to be precise once in a while.
(Tip for this step: If you have selected the 897 images like I did and the photo of the GPS is neither the first nor the last image, better select only the image of the GPS device before pressing CTRL-G in step 4. This allows for doing this time calculation with the image, and later reuse the value found. GeoSetter makes it a bit hard to find the image of the GPS in the large image set selected).
- That’s it! Easy, wasn’t it? We’re ready to press Ok in the large dialog displayed. For verification, here is the dialog after I had it filled out:
- All images for which a corresponding data point in the track was found are now marked in red in the thumbnail view and a latitude / longitude position is displayed next to it. The red color by the way indicates unsaved changes, so after a verification that all is well we should save the result of our work (well ok, it was more the work of the software).
- For verification of an image’s position, use the map window (turn back on pressing CTRL-M) by selecting only the image you want to find on the map, and press CTRL-Z (or use the curious looking glass icon in the map view’s button row that shows only a single exclamation mark… I found using CTRL-Z works better for me):
- The final step – don’t forget to save the data! Just press CTRL-S!
By the way, for my 897 images I could automatically geo-locate only 782, and GeoSetter provided a nice warning about this. The setting of so many images at once took also a while on my old desktop machine, but if I don’t have to work myself, I’m fine with that.
But the advantages of really doing geotagging don’t stop with the display of the position where the photo was made on a map, so stay tuned…
Related posts:
- Geotagging III – how to associate names to the places you have been to
- Geotagging – a renewed approach
Tags: Freeware tip, Geo-tagging, Photo, Photo Location, Quote
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