One Day, One Picture

Cathedral Immaculate Conception, originally uploaded by Chester Bullock.

Geotagging is becoming more popular, but there is still a large number of people that don’t geotag their pictures. For me personally, I do it in case I capture an image of something people want to see when they come to Colorado, or in one of the other places I might go for fun or business. I know it helps me to know what the opportunities are when I go to a new place.

Geotagging used to be hard work. You would have to make note of shooting locations as a waypoint in a GPS (which I don’t have), place them on a map in something like Flickr, or go through a program like Google Earth and make note of where each shot was taken. Luckily, there is a new crop of geotagging software coming out that is taking the pain out of this task.

For my most recent round of photos, shot near downtown Denver on February 13, I turned to RoboGeo from Pretek, Inc. RoboeGeo truly takes the pain out of geotagging your images. If you have a GPS, you can load your GPS log into the program, and it will match timestamps from the log with timestamps in your images, automatically inserting the appropriate coordinates.

Since i don’t have a GPS, I opted to use one of the other options - geotagging via Google Earth. I loaded the images into RoboGeo, and then selected the Google Earth icon. This launches Google Earth (assuming you have it installed), and overlays a small dialog box on top of the program. You go to the location you took the photo, center the cursor as close as you can to either your vantage point or the object itself, and then hit the “Geotag” button in the dialog box. Once you do this, the next image (in order of filename) appears. You repeat the process until you have tagged them all. Close the dialog box, and RoboGeo comes back to the forefront. From here you tell it to add the location info into the EXIF headers of your files and save them. At this point you can overwrite the originals, or save to an alternate location. Once you have saved, you can also choose to upload into your Flickr account. I did this once, and the process was as painless as using Flickr Uploader or any other tool. For this specific batch of photos, I had other things to do first, so I uploaded via Flickr Uploader later.

RoboGeo was exceptionally easy to use, particularly for a relative geotagging newbie such as myself. At $40 for a non-commercial personal copy, this is well worth it for anyone who takes a lot of pictures. Don’t take my word for it though. Download the demo version (after you see what the limitations are) and give it a try.

Even if RoboGeo isn’t right for you, do everyone a favor and start geotagging your photos. The next time you need to find a specific location, you’ll be glad someone did.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 13th, 2008 at 8:00 pm and is filed under Daily Photo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.