Tone Ag Consulting Ltd.

I was out in the field on Thursday so I brought along a GPS and a digital camera and took some photos to geotag.  Geotagging is taking a photo and adding information about where it was taken.   (If you want a more technical definition, check out Wikipedia.)

Equipment:  I used a Garmin GPSmap 60 and a Canon PowerShot A590.  These are both reliable devices on the low end of the price scale. 

The first step was to synchronize the date and time on both devices.  I turned on the GPS, gave it a few moments to pick up the satellites, then pressed Page until I could see the GPS time.  Then I turned on the camera, and set the time to match the GPS’ time as closely as I could.

Then I set the GPS to record a point every 90 seconds (Menu / Tracks / Setup Record Method: Time, Interval: 00hrs 01 min 30sec). 

As a check, I took a picture of a couple of road intersections.  This provided me with reference points so that when I geotag the images I can verify that the image is in the correct location.  Unfortunately, 90 seconds can a long time when you’re driving, so I ended up with a point along the diagonal instead of on the intersection.  Oops.  Next time I’ll mark a point right at the intersection rather than just relying on the tracks. 

I put the GPS in my back pocket and did my day’s work while snapping photos.  I then used Picasa to download the pictures and Garmin Mapsource to download the points.  In Mapsource I had to save the tracks as .gpx (GPS eXchange Format). 

The current version of Mapsource has a bug where it crashes when saving .gpx files.  I saved the file in Mapsource’s .gdb format and used GPSBabel to convert to .gpx.   Make sure to select Tracks when converting. 

I tried to use GPicSync to reconcile my tracks and photos, but it put a number of photos in the wrong location.  GeoSetter’s instructions are clearly translated from another language, but it did a much better job of placing the photos.

In the Settings window that pops up when you first open GeoSetter, I set my local time zone under Data Preferences and chose all the “Update Data Automatically when Assigning Map Position” options.  I also chose to have Country Code, Country and State/Province added to the images.   On the main GeoSetter Screen, I chose Images/Open Folder to open the folder with the images I wanted geotagged.  Then I selected all the images and chose Images/Synchronize with GPS Data Files.  I then selected the .gpx data file I had created earlier and chose Ok.  That was about it.  My pictures then showed up as markers in a map window in Geosetter so I could see where my photos had been taken. 

It worked out really well.  It was simple enough that I could send someone else out to take photos and trust that they’ll come back with images I can geotag.  The fiddly bits are done after the photos are taken. 

Key Notes:

• Make sure the times on the camera and the GPS are synchronized as closely as possible
• Make sure your GPS is recording a track.  90 seconds seemed to work pretty well.  I think next time I’ll try for a track point every 60 seconds and see how that works out. 
• Take a couple of photos of features you can locate easily on a map (e.g. intersections) to ensure that the photos are correctly located.

Now I just need to learn how to take better pictures and I’ll be all set!