Friday, March 21, 2008

GeoCode Your Geocaching Photos

I was over at I've Been Thunderstruck blog. It's a tech blog done by a geocacher. It's a nice blog and you should check it out. Their latest post was about a piece of software called GPicSync. GPicSync stands for G:GPS Pic:Pictures Sync:Synchronization and is a Free and Open Source tool. Basically, it adds a GPS location to your photo image file. You can then put the photos in a Google Map. This allows you to see your route and click on the camera icon at the exact spot the photo was taken. Your photo pops up in the map.

The really awesome thing about this is how great a story telling tool this is. Check out this example of a bike ride. It shows the route taken in Google Maps and has the photos in the exact spot they were taken. What a great way to descriptively show your hike and geocaching trip!

GPicSync also has an EXIF viewer. I had been looking for some software that would allow me to read the EXIF files of images. You may recall that I have been attempting to solve various Mystery Geocaches. Well, hiding information in the EXIF files is one method of driving us all crazy trying to figure these things out. There is also a GPSBabel tool. GPSBabel converts waypoints, tracks, and routes between popular GPS receivers and mapping programs. It also has powerful manipulation tools for such data.

Did I mention it's free?

Here are the features:

  • automatically geocode your photos (in the EXIF header)
  • use a GPS tracklog in the GPX format or NMEA format (multiple selection possible)
  • Support elevation data if present in the tracklog
  • create a Google Earth KML file to directly visualize the geocoded photos and track in Google Earth
  • create a Google Maps file to publish your pictures and track on the web (more)
  • Automatically associate audio or video files in Google Earth and Google Maps
  • create a Google Earth KMZ file (containing your geolocalized pictures and tracklog).
  • add additional geonames and 'geotagged' metadata (for automatic tagging in Flickr for example) and create an automatic IPTC caption (more)
  • manually write latitude/longitude in a picture EXIF or a selection of photos
  • handy tools integrated (Time correction tool, EXIF reader, GPX inspector, rename pictures with date/location,)
  • supports Jpeg pictures and main RAW files format (more)
  • software available in English, French, German, Italian, traditional and simplified Chinese, Catalan, Russian, Spanish, Polish, Portuguese and Czech (see translations)
Thanks to I've Been Thunderstruck for posting about this great software. Go see their blog. There's plenty of articles on GPS, software and much more.

1 comment:

tonka_boy said...

That's all pretty deep for me. I can't even find tupperware at WalMart.

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