Doomshammer's Weblog

Today I noticed, that Lightroom doesn't work very well with the script I've written to geotag my photos. Though the GPS data is in the EXIF tags, Lightroom doesn't recognize them and (what's even worse) it's doesn't include them into an exported JPG. So you either have to re-run the script over the JPGs or life w/o GPS data in the JPGs.

This wasn't really satisfing for me, so I did a little reaseach on why LR doesn't handle my GPS data correctly. Instead of a real answer to that question, I found a plugin for Lightroom which basically does what my script does, but it's seamlessly integrated into Lightroom. The plugin works really great and has a couple of more features than my script could ever have. Therefor I won't do any further development on the script an use the plugin instead (the funny thing is, that in the background, the script is using perl as well ).

You can find the plugin here.

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As you know, I recently received my new iPhone. One cool feature of the iPhone is the built-in GPS module (I know a bunch of other mobile phone do have this feature as well). As I was already searching for a simple solution to geotag my photos w/o much efforts (in terms of money and work), I looked for a way to track my photo trips via the iPhone and later syncronize the GPS data with my photos.

After some searching I found a pretty cool iPhone app. It's name is GeoLogTag (you can grab it for 4$ from the AppStore). The App is as simple as cool. Simply enable it and it'll track your trip and when you are back at home you just press the "GPX" button and the App will transform into a simple webserver where you can grab your GPX files via WLAN.

Now as I found a way to track my trips via iPhone I still needed a tool to get the GPS data into my photos. There are a bunch of tools out there in the internet which will let you sync your GPS geolocation date with your images, but most of them are limited to JPGs. As I am shooting exclusivly in Canon's RAW format with my EOS 5Ds (CR2-Format) these tools won't work. I also found some commercial tools which support CR2-Format, but they are very costly and are running on MS Windows only. So also not the solution I was searching for.

So finally I decided to develop such a tool on my own. My language of choice was (of course) Perl. The good thing is, that there are already modules to parse GPX data as well as a module to process EXIF information. To make the story short... I just finished the first version of the tool. It's pretty simple but effective. You can specify one or more image filenames and a GPX data filename. The script will read out the creation date of the images and will compare it to the dates of the GPX datapoints. If a datapoint doesn't differ more than $X seconds from the images timestamp, the script will tage the longitude and latitude and will write this information into the EXIF metadata of the image. If you specify the "-k" parameter, it'll also add these data as "geo:" keywords.

As the script is written in Perl, it should easily run on any UNIX, MacOS and Windows. It has been written and tested on MacOS X. In first place I wrote this script to support Canon's CR2-Format, but the good thing is that Image::Exiftool supports a bunch of other formats as well, so it may be useful for non-Canon users as well. Feel free to download it and give it a try and let me know how you find it.

Requirements
- Date::Manip
- Log::Log4perl
- Image::ExifTool
- Geo::Gpx

To see the script in action, click here.
Download it here.

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I've found some time today, to add a new feature to Pixlr. The URL to Google Maps now loads a dynamically generated KML file, which Google Maps can use to add so called "placemarks" to the map. This placemark will show the exact position of your geolocation together with the image title, the description and the thumbnail of the photo.

I've added the feature to my photoblog (check out the google maps link) already and will be also avail. in the next Pixlr release.

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