Tomas' log of stuff

In April 2010 I got my first new generation smartphone, the Android based HTC Desire. Like most smartphones today it has a GPS module, which enables a lot of fancy stuff, including tracking your movements and recording them to a file. This again enables the fine art of geotagging your pictures, which this and an unknown number of subsequent posts are about. Geotagging in this context is taking the coordinates of where you were when you took a digital photograph, and storing it inside or with that photo. Obviously your smartphone will support this natively for pictures you take with it, but phone cameras stink, so what I'll be discussing is geotagging of photos taken with *good* cameras, such as a digital SLR or a neat point and shoot.

So after I got my Android phone I set about to find the optimal process for achieving efficient and cool geotagging of my photos. The first part of the process was easy; finding a good app to actually record my movements into a usable file format. The first post in the series will probably be about this, and will focus on Android. Similar apps exist for the competing platforms such as iOS, Windows Mobile and... well, I guess those are the ones that matter. There's also the option of using dedicated GPS devices such as car navigators and hiking GPS'es etc. The requirement is their track data can be exported as a file that can be converted to GPX.
I will not be focusing on dedicated GPS devices for dSLRs such as the Nikon GP-1 because I consider it too expensive and it has several drawbacks and consumes the important data connector port. If you've got it then... hey, congrats... you're done. I might get back to some dedicated third party solutions if an affordable and practical one comes along.

The second part of the job was to find a good geotagging app for matching the GPX track data to the photos I've shot with my Nikon D300s or my venerable Nikon D70 once I get back to my PC. And since I'm using Windows 7 64-bit as my main desktop platform, that's the target OS. This proved to be much harder, in that there's so many apps, each with certain strengths and weaknesses, and there doesn't seem to be and good comparison, so I decided to do my own. This post will be filled with the criteria I will be evaluating as I come up with them, as well as the apps I come across that I plan on testing (and maybe even listing the ones I won't be testing and why). If you have feedback or suggestions from the start, or along the way, feel free to comment with them here.

Testing criteria

Platform	Windows 7 x64 is core criteria, crossplatform solutions such as java or web base a plus
Image Format Support	Must support JPG and most common RAW formats. I will be testing against Nikons NEF format and Adobe DNG. Of special interest will be whether the applications writes directly to the RAW file or leaves the RAW files untouched and store the GPS data in a sidecar such as XMP
GPS data support	GPX : This does not affect the choice of outputting solutions too much, as there's several format translation solutions out there.
Address lookup	Ability of software to lookup coordinates and correlate them to nearby addresses, region, etc. This info would typically be added to additional IPTC fields independant of the coordinate data
Altitude correction	Mobile phone GPSes are notoriously bad at estimating proper altitude. This criteria determines wether the application supports correcting altitude, either by a preset correction value or by estimating surface height from map data
Camera direction	Sofware support for indicating the direction, angle etc, of the shot from the point where the camera is located

Software discovered

Application	Short description	License	Reviewed?
Microsoft Pro Photo Tools 2	Dedicated geotagging utility	Freeware
Geosetter	Dedicated geotagging utility	Freeware
gpisync	Dedicated geotagging utility	Free and Open Source
Geotag
Prune
STOIK Imagic	General purpose image editing/organizing with geotagging support	Basic version (incl geotagging) free
Jetphoto Studio	General purpose image editing/organizing with geotagging support
COPIKS Photomapper	Dedicated geotagging utility	Freeware
VSO Atom GPS	Dedicated geotagging utility	Freeware
GPSTagr	Online geotagging for flickr pics	Free
Picmeta PhotoTracker	Dedicated geotagging utility	Freeware
BR Software PixGPS	Dedicated geotagging utility	Commercial
GeoIPTC	Dedicated geotagging utility	Commercial
Picmeta Picture Information Extractor	Image metadata editor with geotagging support	Commercial

*This post will be updated over the course of the testing

Some very good stuff here. Of course, there's some major omissions imo, but you can't please everyone. Two pictures of Obama? None of the inauguration of Bush with all the consequences that had for the world (you may like or dislike it, but few things were more important). Nothing about the crisis in Darfour and the civil war in Sri Lanka? Earth quake in Iran?

And slightly less important, it's not the end of the decade until a year from now... There's no year 0 in our calendar.

Still. Important stuff. I wish I could believe it's worth bothering to hope for better times to come...
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/12/the_decade_in_news_photographs.html

While I was lounging outside the cottage during easter holidays with my Nikon D70 mounted with the "Bigma" (Sigma 50-500mm), this small guy landed pretty close to me and started jumping around a few meters away. Presumably he was both annoyed at me placing myself on top of the wall he had started building a nest in, as well as attracted to the seasons first insects which were circling my cup of tea, waiting for it to get cool enough.

He seemed happy enough to pose, though. Have to say I'm pretty happy with the shot.

Testing the automatic image posting from Flickr to my BlogCFC blog

Friday was spent driving acrosss Norway from Oslo to Bergen in great weather and through some impressive scenery. We deliberately took a route that noone had taken before or not in so long that they didn't remember it anyway. We didn't stop much, so I didn't take many pictures during the day, but I Uploaded two to picasaweb, one from Aurland and one from Gudvangen.