Or where in the world did I take that photo ?

I’ve see a couple of gadgets at the show for tagging your images with the location from a GPS.
One that I understand, and one that I don’t.

JOBO Photo GPS
The simple one, I understand.

Designed to fit into the hot shoe on your camera, it uses the shutter release signal on the hot shoe centre pin to trigger the storing of the GPS Location then your photo is taken.
Then later you download your photos and the information from the Photo GPS to the same folder, then run an application that tags the images with the location. Here’s the clever part - it also uses an online database of cities, streets, points of interest and adds that into your image metadata, if you shoot RAW it creates XML files for each image.

ATP GPS Photo Finder
The simplest to use.

Designed to carry around with you and not connected to the camera. Put in an SD card and it tags the images.
It can’t use the shutter release, so how does it match up the GPS location to your images?
You set the UTC time from the GPS system into your camera, and then it uses the image timestamp to compare to the GPS location at that time. Simple, but it needs some clever software in the Photo Finder to cope with differences in time between your camera and the GPS.
The smart part is how simple it is, put the SD card into the slot in the Photo Finder and all the JPG files are automatically updated with a geotag compatible with Picasa 2 and Google Earth.

So to me the difference seems to be easy to understand vs easy to use. I understand the Photo GPS, it’s driven straight from the camera; takes more work in tagging the images, but I understand each step. The Photo Finder is really simple to use, put in the SD card and it all happens automatically; it might as well use magic.

But what they do is different, remember the Photo GPS puts in keywords for city, street, point of interest as well as the actual location. How they work is different too, the Photo GPS requires a hot shoe on the camera but the Photo Finder just needs a SD card. So two different products, for different kinds of camera, with different features.

Beats taking notes of which bend on the Grand Canyon south rim I was standing at when I took each picture; writing down the image number off the camera screen in a notebook, along with the lookout point I was standing at, this technology makes notebook and pen seem so old fashioned.
Also see Sony GPS >

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 31st, 2008 at 6:41 pm and is filed under , , . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.