I do geocaching. And naturally, i make photos during my trips. So why not connect the two? What if I could tag my photos with the coordinates they where shot on? My camera does not have a built in GPS receiver, but that is no problem.
My GPS is a Garmin hand held device, with USB port. I’ve chosen GPSBabel, as it is said to work well with Garmin devices. Unfortunately, there is a little problem with USB modules, but a solution can be found here. Just a note: I did the Ubuntu Dapper solution, and had to restart after the editing/creating of the files. No kernel recompiling was necessary.
For USB capable Garmin devices, type in the following command:
$ gpsbabel -t -i garmin -f usb: -o gpx -F tracklog.gpx
This will download the tracks from the GPS to a file called “tracklog.gpx”.
The EXIF metadata section of a photo holds information on the creation time of the photos (among other things), (just make shure that the clock in your camera is adjusted well), so the time stamp of every photo is to be checked against the tracklog, and if a track point with the same time stamp exists, then the coordinates of the trackpoint are to be written to the GPS section of the metadata of the photo.
This is what GPS Photo Correlate does. And it comes with a GUI too. It is capable of interpolation between trackpoints, so if the time stamps are not exactly the same, it will correlate from the coordinates of two adjacent points for the time stamp of the photos. Really easy to use. The only flaw – for me – is that it seems to be unable to write to DNG files.
November 22, 2007 at 7:47 am
To correlate your pictures, are you tried to use the GPSSync kipi-plugin with digiKam ???
http://www.kde-apps.org/content/preview.php?preview=3&id=16061&file1=16061-1.jpg&file2=16061-2.jpg&file3=16061-3.jpg&name=Kipi
You can use google maps to set GPS coordiante manually on pictures:
http://www.digikam.org/?q=node/170
There is also a tool to export GPS info to a KML file for inclusion to Google Earth…
Gilles Caulier
November 22, 2007 at 8:55 am
No i haven’t!
I will check this out. Maybe on the weekend i will do some geocaching, and will have some new photos and track logs.
It all depends on the weather 🙂
Thanks for the info
February 28, 2008 at 7:32 pm
Also have a look at blueMarine. It’s not yet suitable for production use, but I hope there will be soon a final release. There’s a screencast about the geotagging capabilities:
http://bluemarine.tidalwave.it/screencast
I apologize for the quality of the screencast which is not excellent, but it should do a decent presentation of the capabilities.
March 4, 2008 at 10:26 am
To Fabrizio:
I already planned to review blueMarine, but unfortunately after upgrading my computer i was unable to launch the program (some AMD64 vs Java problem) . After your comment i looked at the blueMarine website, and found a solution to my problem in the forums. An article on blueMarine is on the way. And thanks for your comment
January 13, 2011 at 8:38 pm
I have a Garmin Edge 500, which unfortunately seems to not play nice with gpsbabel or some of the other suggestions (and also uses a .fit format instead of .gpx or some other standard). So I spent a bit of time making a utility to tag my photos using the .fit gps track. It can be found here: http://astoryworthtelling.wordpress.com/2011/01/03/geotagging-without-a-dedicated-camera-gps-part-2/