Where am I?

In a bid to tempt consumers, camera manufacturers have built all manner of crap into their products. Pet recognition, an option that will only take a shot if people are smiling, baby galleries. If you are mildly serious about photography; all of these are a complete waste of time. But one gizmo which I wouldn’t mind having is GPS tracking; so that each photo would be marked with the location where it was taken. Not for me of course, but for the wonderful readers of this organ who frequently often occasionally once asked where it was that I took some photos.

In the absence of such facilities in my cameras, I turned to my phone. Not so long ago you only used you phone for making phone calls; but nowadays you kill pigs with angry birds, read the news, fuck around on Facebook and generally waste your life on a three inch screen. Turns out you can also use it to geotag your photos.

GPS4Phone runs on the iPhone. Start it up and you get this:

For general shooting you can capture your location every five minutes. If you are walking around a large temple site and want to record the exact position of every photo, you can capture a point every 30 seconds. If you only want to capture the occasional point, you just give the phone a shake while it is in your pocket. But be careful, you can get thrown out of temples for apparently masturbating via your pocket.

Once you have finished your photo session, you end the capture and can review a map showing the capture points:

Then you generate a QR code which you photograph for future use.

Back home and you place all the photos you want to tag (RAW or JPG) into a directory, along with the photo of the QR code. Then you run a piece of software downloaded from the GPS4Phone site and it reads the QR code and magically alters the exif of all your photos to include location information.

I was going to try this out with our recent visit to the bat temple. But I discovered a fatal flaw with the concept; if you forget to run GPS4Phone before you start taking your photos, it doesn’t work…. In fact, I remembered I had forgotten when we were driving home from the temple. Luckily, there was another temple stop on our way home, the pretty place near the service area on the Bangkok-Chonburi motorway. So I tried it and it worked a treat. When I loaded my photo to Flickr, the location of the shot was shown on a map.

Since then, I have been trying to find a working Wordpress plug-in which will display the map in a post with controls so you can zoom around; so far without success.

But never mind, the next time you want to know where I took a shot, I will be able to tell you; provided I remembered to turn on the iPhone app.

Comments 🔗

2011-06-16 | Pete says

ICWUDT !!

2011-06-17 | Spike says

I had to admit that I had to Google what the hell that meant; but I still don’t understand why you wrote it.

2011-06-17 | Pete says

You made me look at a link which was a question I wrote! Very cunning.

2011-06-17 | Spike says

Ah… Indeed it was your question about the stainless steel temple that lead to the search for a GPS solution. You owe me $2.99.

2011-06-17 | Pete says

I’ll buy you lunch next time I’m in town. Will that cover it?

2011-06-18 | Clive says

Sir, If you have a copy of Lightroom, and if you are interested, an enterprising photographer (Jeffrey Friedl) has written a small plug-in that will help you. Simply, connect your Garmin hand-held GPS unit to your PC via USB cable; configure the plug-in; import your photos. Presto! The GPS data will be in-line inserted into each image’s EXIF data. More info here:-

http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/gps

I do hope this helps.

2011-06-18 | Spike says

Thanks, I’ll book Mantra.

2011-06-18 | Spike says

Thanks Chris; I have Lightroom but I don’t have a Garmin.