Monday 30 June 2008

Geocoding photos

A couple of posts ago I mentioned I was awaiting an GPS bluetooth gizmo. Well (to the dissapointment of my wifie) it arived. I spent a couple of evenings coding or should I better say recoding two peaces of software (python s60) progs to work as I want them to work and now I have a nicelly working GPS data reader and uploader from Symbian S60 phone with Python and a storage card (the data taken can come up to a couple of MB in size) and an external GPS bluetooth receiver.

  • The file is saved with a datetime timestamp, and is internally of NMEA 0183 format.
  • After you transfer the file to your computer (either in NMEA or GPX format - I use my uploader script for the second), you can use a peace of software called gpicsync. You could ofcorse use any other software that does the same job, but I am verry satisfied with gpicsync. It also works on Linux, Win, and OS X.
  • The program asks you to enter the path to the coordinates file (NMEA or GPX formated) and to the directory where the pictures (JPEG format) are kept.
  • You can also do some additional tweaking like the UTC time offset, but other than that you are set to go - so click "Synchronise!" and the coordinates are read from the GPS files and the coordinates are writen to the EXIF info in the JPEG files.
  • All you have to do now is to upload your pics to a web service that can make use of the coordinates embedded in the images, Picasa Web Albums, Flickr, etc. or you can view the locations in Google Earth application or another app that can read KML files.
Here is the web album of some geocoded pics.

And the map of the photo locations.

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