Ted Leung on the air : Geotagging and me

Ted Leung on the air
Ted Leung on the air: Open Source, Java, Python, and ...

Mon, 28 Aug 2006

Lots of Web 2.0 pundits are abuzz with the news that Flickr has enabled geotagging. While this is a cool feature, I am not sure that I am going to be using it much. It's enough work to shoot pictures, process them, and get them uploaded to Flickr along with decent non-geo tags. The thought of yet more work to do in order to geotag seems more exhausting than it does exciting. Perhaps when the Canon 40D comes out (both the 30D and XTi/400D upgrades have failed to impresss) it will have a built in GPS, and then things will be easy....

[23:18] | [photography] | # | TB | F | G | 4 Comments |

If you're playing around with the Organizer, it's pretty easy to drag images to the appropriate place on the map. Works great if you are shooting in your neighborhood and remember where all your shots were taken, but not so great if you're out of town and shooting in unfamiliar areas (which is where this would really shine).

Built in GPS or GPS attachment would make it ridiculous easy. My guess is my next camera will have it.
Posted by Matt Westervelt at Mon Aug 28 23:54:43 2006

Or if you walk a bit, shoot a bit, walk a bit more, shoot a bit more, etc...
Posted by Ted Leung at Thu Aug 31 20:14:55 2006

I wondered about that - I had some conversations with some of their support staff earlier when some of my images were correctly geotagged but not others.
(it turned out to be software: if my workflow included processing through Nikon Capture they were fine, but if I went straight through PSCS they are
not seen by Flickr.)

The geotagging idea can be incredibly cool. There's one application from a couple of years ago where they flew over the entire California coastline and geocoded pix. (Some rich folks got into trouble for their coastline activities as a result!)

There is a new unit that attaches to the camera - diGPS I think - about the size of a handgrip - but its in the US$400 range.

I've worked with an outboard unit, but having the cables hanging around isn't very nice.

If you do have outboard GPS, and you enable track logging, there is software that will compare the timestamps on the image files, and interpolate the location based upon the time in the track log.
Posted by rick at Fri Sep 1 16:33:15 2006

got home tonight - found the GPS link - then realized it won't do you any good anyway as its only Nikon compatible. But for the Nikon user who hasn't already invested in the necessary GPS & cable:
http://www.dawntech.hk/di-GPS/index.htm

There's still the software track loggers.

I must admit - I'd rather just tag the images with proper lat/long and let the system provide the mapping.
Posted by rick at Fri Sep 1 23:31:33 2006

You can subscribe to an RSS feed of the comments for this blog:

Add a comment here:

You can use some HTML tags in the comment text:
To insert a URI, just type it -- no need to write an anchor tag.
Allowable html tags are: <a href>, , , , <blockquote>,  , , <code>, <pre>, <cite>,  and .

You can also use some Wiki style:
URI => [uri title]
 => _emphasized text_
 => *bold text*
Ordered list => consecutive lines starting spaces and an asterisk

<	August 2006					>
Su	Mo	Tu	We	Th	Fr	Sa
		1	2	3	4	5
6	7	8	9	10	11	12
13	14	15	16	17	18	19
20	21	22	23	24	25	26
27	28	29	30	31