Hans Strang, Geotate’s CEO gave a pretty interesting interview on LetsGoDigital, about SnapSpot, a geotagging firmware product (NXP spun-off Geotate to concentrate on its core chipset design business).
The trick behind Geotate’s approach in its low-power consumption is that it only stores GPS data from a particular location without processing it, letting that happen by the time the customer uploads its pictures to a PC.
According to the interview, in order to do that the camera has to turn itself off (and not cause radio signal interference) for about 200ms while Geotate’s software grabs the corresponding GPS data.
Nikon SLR’s
If you want to spend some money before cameras with Geotate’s software reach the market in the next semester, look for Nikon models with the MC-35 connector like the:
D1H (~US$1,5K),
D1x (~$2,5K),
D2Hs (~$3,4K, but not the D2H which lacks GPS support),
D200 (~$1,5K),
D300 (~$1,7K),
D2x, D2Xs, and
D3 (~$5,5K).
Now get a GPS receiver that connects through the MC-35 to the camera’s body. If you want to try making your own check:
But if you don’t want to try your hand in none of the projects above, you can get a GPS receiver that connects to the MC-35 plug directly with either one of these:
This Crave interview shows Canon’s viewpoint on GPS.
Nokia has a free Location Tagger for photo geocoding
GE will be launching a low-cost model sometime during Summer: GE E1050g (via ThinkCamera)
Meanwhile from PMA, Geotate from Taiwan promises a cheap GPS camera, from CNET Asia.
To allow for these developments, British start-up Air working on breakthrough semiconductor technology lowering power consumption 100x for GPS chipsets in digital cameras (article).
Take pictures with your cell phone while geotagging them with the respective GPS coordinates. Upload for sharing with text, sounds and videos. If you got the compatible Nokia or Sony-Ericson model you can try it right now with Bliin.
Bliin uses the GeoTracing framework, covered in another post. Registered download a J2ME midlet to your phone or MacOSX and Windows desktops clients with Bluetooth GPS.
You can upload and share photos with the phone clients but not the desktop versions. In fact, the sharing, made through bliin.com/share and most of the features will “come soon”, the whole package is going through a public beta.
Blogs Mashup
After you upload your photos you can visualize them in a Google Maps screen (satellite, maps, hybrid) with a cool widget from zooming in/out, toggling map types and accessing your own stuff.
Bliin will show your location in a world map at the website along with other users and photos at their corresponding locations.
The phone client has a radar view that displays who’s around within a given range to feed into the social networking take.
MacOSX Client
If you want to try the Mac client first create an account at the website
It asks for your Bluetooth GPS. Turn Bluetooth on if it isn’t, search for the device and pair it up (you might need the passkey).
If you don’t have one around, check Semsons for Bluetooth models (pick one with Sirf Start III GPS chipset).
Bliin now sits at the menu bar as a task item.
If the color at the center is red it couldn’t login to the server.
Blinking green, GPS is working fine.
Check the PDF with more info on the color scheme.
The only thing that will happen is that you will be able to see your current location in the map.
So
For desktop usage because of the lack of support for photo (or text, sound) upload the package isn’t quite there just yet.
But if the target public are users of mobile phones which might take precedence in the implementation of feature set bliin promises a good punch (and you can upload photos right now).
Great post by Dr Andrew Hudson-Smith at Digital Urban about using the N95, the new object of desire from Nokia with a freely available geotagger and photo uploader called ShoZu.
ShoZu in fact supports a lot of models so you don’t need to through away your current one just yet.
The post explains in great detail how to get up and running with the product.
GisTeq announced Photo Trackr, product similar to the Sony GPS-CS1 which allows photos taken with any digital camera (and not only Sony models) to be sync’ed up via USB with the corresponding GPS coordinates of the location where they were originally taken.
It includes a clock synchronization function, a tag button to remember waypoints, re-chargeable Li-ion battery and according to the specs [pdf] its software provides integration with Flickr, Google Maps with history and playback display functions of recorded routes.
Windows only. MSRP $129.00 (not for sale online yet).
I don’t know how many times I drove past Lexington Reservoir. The big lake you see alongside Hwy 17 in Los Gatos. Recently I decided it was time to explore it a bit.
And I’m glad I did. I saw nature that I haven’t seen yet at such close and vital range. Red winged black birds, a garden snake, quick to go away turtles, a full breed of wilderness right by Hwy 17th.
It is like going by the side of a piece of network fiber and watch it from a totally different frame of time. Like being outside seeing these bits going upstream now, alongway ducks, birds and turtles.
Getting there
Exit at the Alma Bridge Road overpass, take the Alma Bridge Road South and park on the left side of the road. Kinda empty and without much movement so an ugly car wouldn’t call much attention by itself up there.
Otherwise, if you want the official Parking spot and probably safer place to park you need to exit just by the top of the last hill before the Santa Cruz Ave Exit.
You can make your own trail along the borders of the water right from the Parking lot or use the trails starting at the gates. You can loop around the lake so it has trails at both sides.
It is a weird place to walk by, reminds you of leftovers from the time the highway was built, pieces of black tarp holding the change in the original terrain. And walk at the grass is like entering in a world that is so apart from the fast rhythm of the asphalt.
Check the trail at MyOutdoors.net (and here is the link to the actual maps.) The for-sale webservice I have to say has a pretty clean interface. Lots of Ajax probably going on behind the scenes.
But on a bit of UI Design the dot in the toolbar could instead be a hand so one can see right away which one is the selection tool, if that is really it (or an arrow). The Upload .gpx link should be in a more visible spot. And I couldn’t figure out why the URL for the corresponding Flickr photo wasn’t taken.
So I guess the fate of a web service lives on its easy of use and quality of response. At this point easy as 1-2-3 fits pretty well.
[Like the way GpsTagr works for example. A webservice that doesn’t get in the way. GpsTagr converts Location info (GPS data) from embedded Exif headers of .jpg images into GeoURL Tags.]
A tool at its best shouldn’t get in the way of what you are trying to accomplish.
Geotagged photos
Some other photos from the trail are available at Flickr, imported also into Panoramio and EveryTrail.
And as you grew to expect, you can also download the corresponding .kml file from MyOutdoors.net and open it in Google Earth and its virtual reality. Panoramio will even provide a tour with your uploaded and geotagged photos that is still buggy on the Mac.
By bits, by feet. So close by and so far away.
It was nice to stop, by it.
This other post already covered a way for Windows users to go about geotagging photos. The idea is to write your position data to the JPEG header of a given photo. This is done by updating its EXIF header with dedicated packages. I first covered Geotagging and Exif headers here.
Until cameras equipped with GPS become affordable you can get the job done by combining the track log from a GPS receiver with software that can write the GPS coordinates (latitude, longitude, altitude) to the photos themselves.
For MacOS (something that I could’ve been using for a much longer time now if somehow one could just know better) there is GPSPhotoLinker and the useful port of GPSBabel+. Another option for editing exif headers is JetPhotoStudio but I haven’t tried it yet.
Hike Away
In the example below, I tracked a hike at Castle Rock State Park off Hwy 35, through Skyline Blvd. You can see part of the trail at this page of EveryTrail. Notice that if you go there during weekdays chances are that you will hear shots (more like explosions) from a close by gun range for most of the day.
But if you got your day-off anyway bring an iPod or something else to cover the noise and its echo rolling through the mountain range. I wish these guys could be forced into using silencers but for kids that didn’t outgrow their love for guns that seems to be the sole reason to play this game.
Tracking
But I digress… I forgot to turn the tracking on (but I did sync the camera and GPS receiver clocks this time) so the log only started from Goat Rock onwards. With the Magellan Explorer you only need to connect its USB cable and the storage area shows up as a storage device.
Notice that you will first need to save the Active Track in the Magellan. Also after making a copy delete it from the receiver, it takes a really long time to load the existing tracks after you have half a dozen of them laying around.
GPSBabel+ let you select from a whole range of devices (that you can have connected) or actual log files to full set of output formats including .gpx (GPX XML) which I choose in this case. At this point you can grab the photos you took at that the same time you had the GPS tracklog being recorded.
Exif Headers
With GPSPhotoLinker you can perform a batch processing of photos by having it reading data from the .gpx file and matching the timestamp of the photo with the closest position you had at or around that same time.
You can adjust the time of the photos in case they didn’t quite sync up as expected. In this case pay attention to the date/time format used in the .gpx file:
898.000000
Notice the Z at the end of the timestamp: 19:41:53.910Z
That indicates that this UTC time or Greenwich based so you need to adjust it based on your timezone. For PDT or Pacific Daylight Savings this means subtract 7 from it which matches the 14:41 pm time in the camera.
Panoramio & Google Earth
After loading the .gpx file, the photos you want to tag and adjusting or not the time in the photos you can choose Batch mode to have all photos processed at once.
Now you need to pick a site to upload your pictures and show them off. Panoramio has a snappy interface that allows you to write descriptions while pictures are being uploaded in background. Later you will be able to see the geotagged photos right at Google Earth.
NXT Software, a Philips company announced the availability of geotagging capabilities for cameras with GPS receivers. I posted about the cameras available currently in the market but they are a bit too expensive at this point. In a couple of quarters they will sure come down in price and the manual tagging of photos won’t be more necessary.
Got a .loc file around from your last hike? Want to share it plus some pics you took? Then be a nice soul and go to Everytrail to share and upload them. Obviously Google Maps and Google Earth are supported by their service.
Cool idea and implementation headed by Joost Schreve, Everytrail’s CEO who gave an interview to Tech Digest.
Hans Strang, Geotate’s CEO gave a pretty interesting interview on LetsGoDigital, about SnapSpot, a geotagging firmware product (NXP spun-off Geotate to concentrate on its core chipset design business).
