Skip to main content

Geotagging photos using GPS tracks, ExifTool and Picasa

I take a lot of photos while trekking, and most of the time I'm also carrying a GPS with me. As my camera don't have a built-in GPS, my photos are not geotagged while shooting. Luckily, this is an easy task if you've kept your GPS logs from the trip. 

I'm still very happy with my Garmin GPSmap 60CSx that I bought 7 years ago. By changing the setup, the GPS allows me to automatically save the tracks to the memory card. I get one GPX file for each day trekking named with the date. I can easily transfer these tracks to my computer or smartphone with a cable or a card reader. 

Before I converted to Mac, I used GeoSetter to geotag my photos on Windows. Now, I want to do it on the command line using the great ExifTool by Phil Harvey. I installed it on my MacBook using Homebrew:

brew install exiftool

After copying my GPX file to the image folder, I'm simply running:

exiftool -geotag=my.gpx ./

If you forgot to sync the camera and GPS time before your trip, you can use the geosync-option to fix it: (60:00 = 60 minutes):

exiftool -geotag=20140329.gpx -geosync=-60:00 ./

You have a lot of options, so make sure to read the "Geotagging with ExifTool" documentation. ExifTool is modifying the Exif headers of your image files, storing the location data in the same file. 

To see the result on a map, I'm using Picasa.  


Click the map pin button (bottom right) to see the map. If the positions are not shown on the map, try to right-click the image folder and select "Refresh Thumbnails". 

If you don't have a GPS track you can always use Picasa to manually geotag your photos. 

Be aware! I just learnt that social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram removes the Exif data from your images. Google+ don't. 

Now, how can you display the photos on your own map? It will be the topic of my next blog post. 

Comments

Pepper said…
There is need to install homebrew to get ExifTool. A Mac DMG installer is available from the ExifTool home page. Plus, this version is likely to be more up-to-date than the version you get via homebrew.
8 September 2014 at 16:00
Unknown said…
Thanks for your brilliant work.

However Picassa will be gone in April. Can I use this plugin for its successor "Google Photos".

And I'd like to use photo image files stored in local storages. Can I add some function to load these ones to this plugin by use using HTML5's photo api?

Thanks for advance.
22 February 2016 at 03:37
Ron said…
Thanks for your post. Some helpful stuff here. I am new to this whole geotagging thing, but it is an awesome idea. I really like the idea of being able to share my adventures in more detail. Of course like all good things there are cons as well, but with a little common sense there isn't much we need to worry about.
I have heard a lot about ExifTool, it is something I am going to look into. I have been scouring around for some good tools and what not for geotagging, so i really appreciate your advice.
Another sources I found to be helpful: http://www.paintshoppro.com/en/landing/geotag-photos/
It has a lot of good ideas for equipment, pros and cons, and other general info for newbie geotaggers like me.
Thanks again
11 July 2016 at 22:50
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Creating a WebGL Earth with three.js

This blog post will show you how to create a WebGL Earth with three.js , a great JavaScript library which helps you to go 3D in the browser. I was surprised how easy it seemed when reading a blog post  by Jerome Etienne . So I decided to give it a try using earth textures  from one of my favourite cartographers, Tom Patterson . WebGL is a JavaScript API for rendering interactive 3D graphics in modern web browsers without the use of plug-ins. Three.js is built on top of WebGL, and allows you to create complex 3D scenes with a few lines of JavaScript. If your browser supports WebGL you should see a rotating Earth below: [ Fullscreen ] To be able to display something with three.js, you need three things: a scene, a camera and a renderer. var width  = window.innerWidth,     height = window.innerHeight; var scene = new THREE.Scene(); var camera = new THREE.PerspectiveCamera(45, width / height, 0.01, 1000); camera.position.z = 1.5; var rende...
11 comments
Read more

Thematic Mapping Engine

It's time to introduce the Thematic Mapping Engine (TME). In my previous blog posts, I've shown various techniques of how geobrowsers can be used for thematic mapping. The goal has been to explore the possibilites and to make these techniques available to a wider audience. The Tematic Mapping Engine provides an easy-to-use web interface where you can create visually appealing maps on-the-fly. So far only prism maps are supported, but other thematic mapping techniques will be added in the upcoming weeks. The engine returns a KMZ file that you can open in Google Earth or download to your computer. My primary data source is UNdata . The above visualisation is generated by TME ( download KMZ ) and shows child mortaility in the world ( UNdata ). The Thematic Mapping Engine is also an example of what you can achieve with open source tools and datasets in the public domain: A world border dataset is loaded into a MySQL database . The same database contains tables with statistics ...
45 comments
Read more

Creating 3D terrains with Cesium

Previously, I’ve used three.js to create 3D terrain maps in the browser ( 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 ). It worked great for smaller areas, but three.js doesn’t have built-in support for tiling and advanced LOD algorithms needed to render large terrains. So I decided to take Cesium for a spin. Cesium is a JavaScript library for creating 3D globes and 2D maps in the browser without a plugin. Like three.js, it uses WebGL for hardware-accelerated graphics. Cesium allows you to add your own terrain data, and this blog post will show you how. Impressed by the terrain rendering in @CesiumJS - with a 10m elevation model for Norway! Farewell Google Earth. pic.twitter.com/RQKvfu2hBb — Bjørn Sandvik (@thematicmapping) October 4, 2014 Compared to  the dying Google Earth plugin , it's quite complicated to get started with Cesium. The source code is well documented and the live coding Sandcastle is great, but there is a lack of tutorials  and my development slows down when ...
12 comments
Read more