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Geo-tagging photographs with a GPS unit
I'm usually pretty good at remembering where I took each and every photograph. Or so I thought. It seems to be with increasing frequency these days that I come across a photo or two that I never labeled and I have no idea where it was taken. Sure, I know which country, but the names of some of these small, one-pony towns I visited have disappeared from my head.
20 years from now it will only get worse – not only will my memory be shoddier, but with the advent of digital cameras, I now take a lot more photos.
And that's why the Sony GPS-CS1KA GPS Unit Kit is a pretty cool idea. This smallish unit (4.2 x 1.3 x 6.9 inches) records your location every 15 seconds and then syncs it up with photos you've taken with a digital camera. Such technology will not only tell you the city in which you've taken the photograph, but if you want to return to the same street corner 20 years later, the GPS coordinates will get you there.
Just as cool is the mapping feature which plots the exact locations of the photos with virtual pushpins on a Google map. Roll over the pushpins and up pops all your photographs taken in that spot, simply blowing away all those photo albums you've created in the past.
This is a nifty little toy, especially if you take a lot of photos. Personally, however, I'm going to wait until this function is incorporated into a digital camera instead of it being a stand alone device.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Greg Dec 31st 2007 3:41PM
You don't need this specific device if you have some type of GPS that lets you save track logs. There is/was a project at Microsoft Research called the World Wide Media Exchange -- they created a utility that does the same thing with the track log from any GPS. It's not fancy and doesn't have a lot of features, but it's free and it works for geotagging your photos. The original site is http://wwmx.org, but the download links seem to be disabled at the moment. An alternate download site at http://research.microsoft.com/research/downloads/Details/eadb6a33-b1b8-4c4d-b713-64fae728f74f/Details.aspx seems to be still working. You can also do a Google search for "location stamper" and you'll find several articles about the utility.
Dale Jan 2nd 2008 4:44AM
That is awesome. I do alot of driving and often will take well over 500 photos in a day and have had times where I took a photo and didn't get quite the results I wanted and wished to return to the same place but couldn't remember where it was.
Dale
http://pbase.com/bangorphoto
Jack DeNeut Jan 2nd 2008 6:46PM
I bought one of these Sony units about six months ago, and although it's a great idea, it doesn't work as well as I'd hoped.
The way it works is very simple - it records your position every 15 seconds, along with the exact time, and then the software matches up the time stamps in the GPS device with the time stamps on your photos to determine the location in which a photo was taken.
The first issue is that you have to make sure the time settings on your camera are *very* accurate, meaning less than 30 seconds of error when setting the time from a very reliable source like http://www.time.gov/
Secondly, the GPS hardware in the Sony device is not very good. The accuracy is often no better than a few hundred feet from your actual location, and the device itself must be pointed *directly* at the sky at all times (I actually duct taped it to the top of my baseball cap at one point). Half the time, it didn't record my position at all.
My recommendation would be to spend a few more bucks and buy a better GPS unit, and then use its track logs to geolocate your photos using software like Greg mentioned above. I ended up buying a Garmin 60Csx, which is very accurate (if a little expensive), and only needs the antenna peeking out of my backpack to reliably record GPS data.
Neil Jan 2nd 2008 6:51PM
Thanks all, for the extra tips and info!