Geo tagging

[Colin]

Having read about geotagging I thought I would give it a go. I dug out my old Garmin GPS12 GPS and turned it on stuck it in my camera bag. Then put the bag in the pannier of my bike. I went on a 20 mile trip and stopped to take some photos along the way. Came home downloaded them to the PC and converted from RAW to Jpeg as it seems that most geotag software won't work with RAW EXIF data. I downloaded the track data from the GPS and a free programme called Gpicsync from http://code.google.com/p/gpicsync/. It took me a couple of minutes to work out that I needed to add 2 hours to the UTC time to get the GPS data and photos to sync. When finished the software creates a Google Earth .kml file with your route shown on it and a small thumnail image of each of your photos where you took them. You can click on the thumbnail to see a larger image. Also Google Earth now own Panoramio and so there are also little camera icons scattered around the map too so you can see others photos taken in the area. Even being a techno junkie I was amazed at how well this all worked. I am working up a few screen shots for my camera club and will post them when I am done.

One great thing about this software is that it copies your images before it tags them and only alters the exif data on the originals then so no probs with corrupted files.

This is a screen shot of the exif data after tagging.