iPhone Geolocation

There’s been quite a bit of interest recently about using a GPS device to track where you’ve shot photographs - this is called geolocation. There are many devices on the market that will do this for you... at a price.

How would you like to be able to geolocate for free - or almost free? You can if you have an iPhone or other smart phone that can use apps.

All you need to do is to find an appropriate GPS tracker and activate it when you’re taking pictures. Then you transfer the GPS data to your computer and use a program on your computer (there are free ones available for that too) to associate the time that you made your image with the location in the GPS data. These programs will put the location into your image’s metadata.

There are several programs that will read the metadata and show you a map, hi-lighting the point where you shot your image. I use Adobe Lightroom - it automatically opens Google Maps on my web browser.

for the original tracking, I'm using a free iPhone app (GPS Stone - from the AppStore -  on the iPhone and a free geocoding software package, GPSPhotoLinker - http://www.earlyinnovations.com/gpsphotolinker) for the Mac.

There are others available for windows - use google to find them.

It takes a little getting used to but it's been working reliably for the past few weeks. It is pretty accurate within a few yards. You can then use Lightroom or GpsPhotoLinker to display the photo's location on Google Maps.

One of the neat things about GPS Stone is that it can be set to record at various intervals in both time and distance. It also can be set to automatically resume recording after a phone call or activating another app (the iPhone OS only allows one app to run at a time). To get the data from your iPhone to your computer, simply email the .gpx track file to yourself - that's not automatic - you have to push a button.

GPSPhotoLinker is very fast and easy to use. Drag the images into the application from the computer or from Lightroom - copy the images to your HD first - don't do it from the CF card because this program will write directly to the metadata in the image files. This way you keep your original files intact if you mess things up.

You can view your position directly from GPSPhotolinker or from Lightroom. If you have imported your images into Lightroom prior to geocoding, you must read the updated metadata from the file (Metadata > Read Metadata From File) after running GPSPhotoLinker. Then you can click on the arrow next to the geolocation metadata (Library mode) to see the image location on Google Maps.

There is one caveat - you must have cell service to use GPS on a smart phone. It does work with ATT’s E network as well as with the G3 service. It just takes a little longer to initiate.

I’m planning on creating a video screencast of the process soon - keep checking here.