There are lots of photo geocoding solutions out there. You can buy a camera with a GPS built in, but hey, you already have a camera and a GPS. Why not just use geocoding software to tie the track time stamp to your digital photo’s time stamp?
Some software solutions do this, but only link your photos to maps — they don’t embed geographic coordinates in the EXIF header, which allows you to use them in multiple location-aware applications. Some free solutions do, but they often have weak feature sets or cumbersome interfaces. RoboGeo is one of the best geocoders available, but it will set you back $39.95.
A new kid on the block, courtesy of Google, looks like it may fill the void. gpisync is a free photo geocoder that will take any GPX track file and use it to write location data to the EXIF header. Coming from Google, it’s very Google Earth friendly of course. It’s in beta (version 0.91) and I haven’t tried it, but it looks like it could be worth checking out. I’d love to hear from you if you give it a shot.
UPDATE: Thanks to Eric (comment below) for setting the record straight re: Google Code.
Via Digg.
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About Rich Owings
FWIW, I don’t think that this is a Google backed product; it’s just hosted on Google Code which is kind like Source Forge or other open source code repositories. Not that it matters too much, but it can be good to reset one’s expectations a bit to realize this is not a Google product.
Eric,
Thanks for the correction. One of the great things about running this blog is that I learn so much from the readers. I appreciate you taking the time to set the record straight.
For we in the minority on Macs: GPSPhotoLinker works both on jpegs and raw. http://oregonstate.edu/~earlyj/gpsphotolinker/. This has been around for some time and wasn’t mentioned on the Wikipedia item mentioned.
Also PhotoGPSEditor: http://www.mmisoftware.co.uk/pages/photogpseditor.php.
I think both are uncrippled shareware.