Works For Me: Geotagging Photos

So one thing that I've been wanting to do for a while is pin photos to a map so that there would be no confusion over where I was standing when a photo was taken. Geotagging makes this possible by associating GPS coordinates with a digital photograph. That said, the GPS to software to presentation landscape is still a mess -- most geotagging "solutions" suggest you point out on a map where you were standing and they'll give you the coordinates. When you're filling up a 2gb flash card with jpegs, this isn't an acceptable solution.

So here's the what-all of what I did:

1. For the GPS component, I picked up a Garmin eTrex Venture HC because, and here's where things get silly, it's got a native USB connection. Thus, getting the Venture HC was cheaper than getting the lesser Legend and a Serial-to-USB converter. I can't say I'm wildly impressed with it -- its satellite acquisition seems slow to me and the user interface is thus far clumsy even for the most menial of tasks -- but it gets the job done. Very much worth noting is that it is not currently Mac-compatible right out of the box. It comes with PC software and my Mac pretty much ignored it when I plugged it in. So I took it over to the PC and installed the bloody useless software which Windows Vista bitched and moaned about in the Proceed/Cancel way that it does when we got to the driver installation (which came after a bunch of yet-to-be-used software). If I had any hope that some other GPS could do better for cheaper, I'd be seriously underwhelmed -- but I'm currently under the impression that this unimpressive state of affairs is as good as it gets.
2. After some unsuccessful digging -- inclusive of finding some Microsoft spare-time projects that aren't Vista compatible, good job guys! -- I came across EasyGPS. This software actually does what I want it to and that goes an awfully long way with me. It can yank the track log right off my USB GPS and put it wherever I tell it to. (I haven't found an "oh, and purge it from the GPS while you're in there" button, but it should be easy enough to get around that limitation.) It can also try to geotag photos -- very slowly, involving rewriting the .jpeg images with new metadata as near as I can tell -- though not many (that is, any I've found) other applications actually respect the tags EasyGPS lays down. EasyGPS also marks up your downloaded track log with the .jpeg file (paths) associated with your trip -- but they put the wrong slashes in for a Windows machine with a network drive (// instead of \\), so be ready for a bit of find-and-replace if you intend to review your tracks in EasyGPS. There are also a host of other features, but what I really wanted it to do was get the dang track data from the GPS and it does that perfectly.
3. From here on out, it's all about TripTracker.net. This web site is fantastic for my purposes. Feed it a bunch of photos and one of those .gpx files that EasyGPS was kind enough to pull for you and it'll trace out the path on a Google map and pin the photos you uploaded to it. It's brilliant, even if there are a couple of behavioral snags, bugs and flukes. They've even got a (Windows) client app for mass uploads -- since upload by HTTP really is an abomination that was Not Meant To Be.

I'd like to include a screenshot of how cool this mapping capability is, but it seems that that might be a violation of the Google maps terms of service. There's some sort of irony in there, but I'm not quite able to put my finger on it, you know?

Anyway, key learnings are pretty simple: Windows PC and USB GPS -- Garmin brand works -- serving as the platform with EasyGPS and TripTracker.net serving as the applications.


Update: Per the comments below, TripTracker's got blog widgets so I can tie in my trip to my blog rather more precisely. Click here to get it, I'll be testing 'em out with a short road trip later this month. Prima facie looks pretty dang good though -- I'm looking forward to it. Thanks for the tip Gregor!