After yesterday’s unpleasant little moan about the difficulties of [tag]geotagging[/tag], cyberspace has made everything more or less right again. First off, Jeffrey Early, author of GPSPhotoLinker, took the time to deal with my queries and suggest strongly that I complain to iView. I will, but now that they are owned by Microsoft I’m not all that optimistic.
I had also posted a comment at High Earth Orbit, which has lots of good info about geotagging, in response to a post about how to geotag Flickr photos “the right wayâ€. Andrew Turner, the author, was kind enough to reply, pointing me to PictureSync, an uploader that supports many image sharing web sites beyond Flickr. I downloaded 1.5, but that kept giving me an error, so I tried the 1.6 beta and that worked like a charm. I uploaded one test image (another Plumeria, of course), all the tags got through, and it appeared on my map automagically.
Andrew also had an interesting suggestion for GPSPhotolinker, to make it more usable when one does not have a GPS machine to supply a track:
What I would like is if GPSPL allowed me to set & store locations and then later assign those locations – or a simple interface to build a “fake†track file (I type in where I was at what times, from calendar, memory, tickets, etc) that is then used.
That seems like a great idea, although there are actually lots of other tools out there that will allow you to add geographic information to a photo in other ways. Semaflickr is one of the more interesting ones, although it only works for photos already on Flickr and only uses Flickr’s very non-standard geotags. And maloXP suggested a bookmarklet that claims to make geotagging even easier within Flickr; I have not needed to try that, but it is good to know it exists.
So it seems like I’m all set. And I am definitely abandoning Fickr Uploadr in favour of [tag]PictureSync[/tag]. You should too.
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Damn, PictureSync for Win still in development…….
I feel your pain. Win still in development …
Hi Jeremy, glad PictureSync is working for you. At present it’s not using the Flickr geodata API so relies on Flickr importing the location from the EXIF data (that PictureSync will preserve or write), but support for their API methods is being added too (and has the benefit of working when updating previously uploaded photos).
I’m actually also expanding PictureSync’s own geocoding (geotagging if you prefer) functionality, and an address book of locations is planned for that, along with easier integration for Google Earth.
Ref to the time that the Windows release is taking—I’ve been balancing other work with its development so its has been on hold for the past month…it’ll definately be out before Christmas though (in as much as that’s reassuring)!
Thanks Jacob. I prefer using the EXIF geo-information, rather than any proprietary tags, for all the usual reasons, mostly portability. A register of locations would be a handy facility. As for Windoze users, I’m sure they will welcome their version when it is ready. But plese, don’t get trapped into ignoring the OSX version.
Hi!
I’m glad you found semaflickr useful for geotagging your photos. It does have the ability to use the geo:lat and geo:lon system for tagging photos.
The reason it is avoided in the current version (it was default in earlier development versions to use tags for geolocating photos) is that it result in a lot of queries when you are browsing photos which really increasing load time.
If you have ten photos, with the new style non standard photo tags from Flickr, you can get all the information to browse these pictures with just one query (can even fetch 100 at a time). But if you use the tags system (geo:lon, geo:lat) then you have to for each of these 100 photos, issue another query to get the tags (and hence the geo:lat and geo:lon information) which becomes really slow.
If you think it would be interesting to get the photos from other sources, other than Flickr, please feel free to suggest something to me and if it works on the Mac, then I may be able to see if it can be plugged in.
Best!