Works for Me: Geotagging Photos Demo

Behold the short little outing that we needed to do in order to properly test our GPS/Camera/Documentation setup.





What we did: We spent a night at the coast. We tend to stay at the Ocean Lodge in the suites on the inside of the property with soaker tubs and fireplaces, though the establishment is getting to the age where it's starting to get a bit worn but it's still too young to warrant aggressive proactive maintenance. We were originally planning on eating at Pizza a' Fetta, but decided that we weren't quite hungry enough to take on one of their pizzas properly, so we ate at the Warren House Pub. We've eaten there before and it's something of a mixed bag in terms of atmosphere, though it tends to get nicer as the evening wears on and more middle-aged folks come in and mellow out the joint. The Smoker's Platter of smoked seafoods is delightful, but needs much more mustard, and the Manhattan-style Clam Chowder (tomato base instead of milk base) is fantastic. We finished the meal in insulin shock from a slice of apocalyptic chocolate cake. The next day -- that would be "this morning" for all you stalkers out there -- the weather was utterly glorious so after failing to stop by Sleepy Monk because their storefront was closed for the off-season, we switched the Garmin eTrex Venture HC on and headed south to Tillamook with occasional scenery breaks for the Canon Powershot S3IS before taking highway 6 back home. The progression of the trip has now been uploaded to my computer and in turn uploaded to TripTracker.net where it is available for viewing -- just click that nifty little map above.


What I Learned:

• The red points in TripTracker represent different elements, generally speaking, within which are the blue points that photos are attached to. You can edit the XML if you'd like, or just turn the GPS off and on as it will append a new when it starts ing again. (There might be a simpler way to make the GPS start a new , but since I'm used to editing XML, I'm not inclined to arguing with a GPS that I don't intuitively recognize the power button on.)
• The power button on the Garmin eTrex Venture HC is the lower button to the right of the screen that looks like a light bulb. Because lightbulbs only have GPS coordinates when turned on, I guess.
• The Canon Powershot S3IS is substantially less impressed by the glorious colors of filtered light in the forest than I am. Either that or I am getting a bit too close to being medically insane for my continued comfort. So I'll blame the camera. Besides, we have Photoshop to make it see things my way.
• When the camera runs out of batteries, it's good to have thought to bring a bunch of spares. Also worth noting that the new 4GB flash card doesn't have bad sectors that eat entire file systems just out of spite.
• Picasa can put your files in the wrong place as fast as that USB2 cable can move them. If it weren't Picasa, I'd have very strong and rather hostile words for it.
  
• In Photoshop CS, the Image > Adjustments > Variations is very close to being a very cool feature. It's rather like visiting the optometrist and having them go "Which is better, number one... or number two?" where you can tell them what got better, but they're not going to tell you exactly how they did it. (I was trying to fix up a forest photo to better represent the colors that I was seeing as opposed to what the camera -- rather sadly -- recorded.)
  
• But the image that you save out of Photoshop is going to probably have the wrong timestamp which will cause TripTracker to put the photo wherever it sees fit until you go in and change the timestamp with their nice tools -- it's under the green "Customize" button after everything is uploaded.
• TripTracker also apparently has a "Split Entry" option for getting around when you didn't put your s where you wanted them, though I'm not quite clear on how to use it.
• The TripTracker desktop upload application is very very nice. Just feed it everything and let it do the work. I like that a lot.
• It takes a few minutes for your trip to become available as a badge from TripTracker, probably something between data propagation and refreshing a cache. It's not bad at all -- just don't be surprised when it takes a couple of minutes after you upload; you're not doing anything wrong and neither are they.
  
• I still need to buy a power cable compatible down under for my laptop since it's got a grounding pin that just won't work for my global wall-socket adapter.

So yeah. Now I need to play around with adding comments to a trip and figuring out how to translate a trip back to a flash card to send to my grandparents for viewing on their (spam- and malware-free!) digital picture frame. But that will come later. For now, I have to get some sleep. Work awaits in the morning.