Geotagging, how hard can it be?
I have been wanting to try Geotagging for a while but have taken an eternity (for many reasons) to actually get a GPS tagger. I initially started out with the intention of looking at the JOBO PhotoGPS until I read Scott Kelby’s review which swiftly changed my mind quickly help me decided my dollars were going elsewhere.
Doing more digging around various forums and Google, I eventually plumped for the AMOD AGL3080. This wasn’t however as easy a step as I thought as Mr Amazon decided he didn’t want to deliver to me as I live in Australia. Having previously looked at the AMOD website it also appeared that it wouldnt let me buy directly but instead pointed me back to Mr Amazon… However after managing to get hold of someone from AMOD via e-mail and explaining my prediciment they were more than helpful in allowing me to purchase one directly from them and indeed having bought it on the Friday it was there waiting for me in the office Monday morning. Now armed with camera and AMOD a tagging I would go.
So what about the AMOD itself. Nice and small, fairly lightweight and with just two buttons. An on/off and one for marking your pictures as you take them, if you remember or can be bothered to do so after every shot, I didn’t… I also wasn’t expecting much from the software that came with the AMOD and I wasn’t disappointed especially as it didn’t appear to be very Mac friendly… That said I was pretty happy with the workflow I had in mind testing and it was just a case of testing it out.
My Flow:-
- Connect my AMOD to my Mac and then open up GPSbabel and convert the AMOD log to a gpx file. Input and output file types being NMEA 0183 and GPX XML respectively.
2. Next open up Photolinker (big brother version of GPSPhotoLinker) and choose to load tracks from file and point to the file created in step one.
3. Click on load photos to locate the image or folder containing the images you want to upload.
4. Highlight an image and ensure the Geotagging console is open and choose edit criteria. This opens up the various options available to help you determine if a picture is correctly tagged.
5. Then you can either continue one image at a time or choose multi images to batch tag them. Once you are happy with both the options in steps five and six click on Geotag # loaded photos.
6. At this stage what you will also notice is the icons that show you both any previously tagged images (red pins) and proposed tags (purple pins).
All well and good for a new shoot, but what if you have already loaded your images you want tagged straight into Lightroom, iPhoto or Aperture? The GPSPhotolinker site has a quick walkthrough of how to handle those additional steps. (This also appears to work fine for Photolinker).
I can now switch over to Lightroom and look at the various tagged images Metadata to see the additional GPS information and if I click on the arrow at the right hand side of the GPS line that will take me to Google Maps showing the longitude and latitude (though I much prefer to see all my images in one place like Photolinker provides).
So Geotagging, is it worth it? Although I can see it not appealing to everyone, and being dismissed as abit of a fad or another step to complicate a workflow. For me it works and although the workflow is slightly more convoluted, as with all workflows after a few times it soon becomes the norm.
I will certainly be tagging more from now on, if I can only get a signal….