On a glorious Sunday, what could be nicer than visiting some gardens? Alas, they don’t quite know how to organize these things in Italy. No scones, no home-made jam, no plants for sale (which is just as well as I have nowhere to put them). But they do have guides, and regimentation. Parties enter on the hour, give or take, and only in parties. No straying. And the guides are nothing if not loquacious. In an area known for bare patches on the hillsides, we were informed that this was the result of “erosion, which could be said to have been caused by atmospheric precipitation, and in particular the type one can call rain”.

But that’s just me talking for the sake of it. In fact this was a wonderful tour of some private gardens that are very seldom open. And if some weren’t quite to my taste, no matter. I do wonder, though, why one would have a wonderful gazebo fully 500 metres from the house. And without that wonderful a view. Could it really be worth strolling up there with a tea-tray?

Strenuous efforts were made to map the proceedings, followed by astonishingly boring efforts to get them all into flickr, and thence into a Google Earth file. (There must be an easier way.) Now, I’m not sure how to share these things. I have the requisite KML file. But how do I put it here so that all can sneer at my geekiness? Maybe you would prefer to just go and have a look at the photos?

Finally finding time to tag, label, metalabel, geo-reference and all that the pictures I took over Easter. Making that task a whole lot easier is a new little application I found called Geotagger. It does one thing — adding latitude and longitude to pictures — really well. I’ve other applications that make it easy to add the information from a GPS device. But if you don’t have a track it can be much harder to place the pictures on a map. Geotagger uses Google Earth to do the job. The coordinates at the centre of the Google Earth map are written to any JPG image you drag onto Geotagger, and that’s it. Once they’re on Flickr, they appear on my Flickr map automagically. Maybe I should also subscribe to Panoramio, but do I really want to clutter Google Earth with my snaps? I think not.

Eventually I’ll get round to organizing the Morocco photos into sets, but not for a while.

So here’s the spooky story, continued. It was supposed to be just a walk. In fact, I had joked with friends about the North American habit of calling an English “walk” a “hike”. But we were both wrong. It was more than a walk. And it was quite a hike. I created a set of photos on Flickr, and when I started they had a narrative structure. But I screwed the upload, so they are not in order on my photo page, and if you view the set as a slide show you don’t see the thrilling story details. Maybe it is possible to re-order the images in my photostream, but I have not discovered how. No matter, I have another plan.

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 way”. 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.