Geotagging Symbian Snaps

dohouch

Like to take snaps when I'm out riding my bike. Getting interested in geotaginng these photos. Will be using a Nokia E51, S60 Series 3 Fp 1 without inbuilt GPS. (No interest in getting bigger phone with inbuilt battery hungry GPS)

Looking for ideas about which Blutooth GPS to buy and the most eficient/smartest way to geotag these snaps with the intention of using them on some kind of Google map online mashup. Really like this one


Want to spend as little time as possbile editing/adjusting data to fit.
thanks

robinph

Not sure what bluetooth gps would be best but once it can get a fix then your sorted really so sholdn't be a whole lot in it. I think your biggest problem will actually be the tagging of the pictures. There seems to be an app approved by Nokia that might do the job, locr, but other pages seem to suggest that it does not actually tag the photos at all so they are only of any use via the locr website wich is possibly not what your after.

I have seen software before that would attempt to merge a track log from a gps with the exif data of the photos that you took to tag them, but that would require a seperate gps device and a PC. It was ages ago that I'd looked for that though and cannot remember what it was called now.

dohouch

robinph wrote: »

There seems to be an app approved by Nokia that might do the job, locr, but other pages seem to suggest that it does not actually tag the photos at all so they are only of any use via the locr website wich is possibly not what your after.

@robinph:Thanks for reply.I think the E series Nokia won't be giving EXIF data, but money and size wise I will be staying away from N Series. Even the above Symbian app from Locr would be a help if it would add geotag in the coment field of each photo, stopping mix ups. will read a bit about it.

turly

See the excellent Free Geography Tools website for a tutorial on using locr here.

It's only slightly painful.

dohouch

turly wrote: »

See the excellent Free Geography Tools website for a tutorial on using locr here.

It's only slightly painful.

@turly:Thanks . realy a lot of good stuff on that freegeographytools.com website;
I'm a complete beginner and now reading this page "/using-gps-data-to-geotag-photos-the-basics" which is bringing me up to speed and will help me when I go looking for a GPS unit.

Krusty_Clown

General guide to geo-tagging photos:
I'm sure there are easier ways, but this should hep get people up to speed:

It's important to get a GPS receiver that supports recording of track-logs or bread-crumb trails and allow you to upload these to a PC. Many don't.

The way I geo-tag my photos, is:
Firstly, synchronize your GPS receiver and Digital camera's clocks before you start recording the tracklog, or taking photos (this will save grief in the long run). Then you can use Microsoft's WWMX location stamper to synchronize the tracklog and Photo time-stamps (reads photo timestamps from EXIF) and then write the GPS co-ordinates (from the tracklog) to the photo's EXIF. Job done! Geo-tagged photos.

Microsoft's WWMX Location Stamper: Download here.

After this, it gets tricky. GPS Visualizer doesn't read exif data in photos (in fact it doesn't read photos at all). What you need to do is generate a CSV file, with the appropriate fields. I use a Perl script to extract the co-ordinates from the exif data in the photos, and write it to a CSV file along with the location of the photos (Here's Adam's tutorial for creating plain-text Waypoint files).

Then you create thumbnails of the photos, upload the photos and thumbnails to your web-server, point GPSVisualizer at the tracklog and CSV file, and generate the HTML (Top job Adam!).

You will need your own Google Maps API Key.
Voila: http://www.google.com/apis/maps/signup.html

Edit the HTML, replace the Google maps key with your own, copy the HTML file to your web server, and presto!

Here's one I made earlier: here

dohouch

Krusty_Clown wrote: »

General guide to geo-tagging photos:
I'm sure there are easier ways, but this should hep get people up to speed:

It's important to get a GPS receiver that supports recording of track-logs or bread-crumb trails and allow you to upload these to a PC. Many don't.

The way I geo-tag my photos, is:
Firstly, synchronize your GPS receiver and Digital camera's clocks before you start recording the tracklog, or taking photos (this will save grief in the long run). Then you can use Microsoft's WWMX location stamper to synchronize the tracklog and Photo time-stamps (reads photo timestamps from EXIF) and then write the GPS co-ordinates (from the tracklog) to the photo's EXIF. Job done! Geo-tagged photos.

Microsoft's WWMX Location Stamper: Download here.

After this, it gets tricky. GPS Visualizer doesn't read exif data in photos (in fact it doesn't read photos at all). What you need to do is generate a CSV file, with the appropriate fields. I use a Perl script to extract the co-ordinates from the exif data in the photos, and write it to a CSV file along with the location of the photos (Here's Adam's tutorial for creating plain-text Waypoint files).

Then you create thumbnails of the photos, upload the photos and thumbnails to your web-server, point GPSVisualizer at the tracklog and CSV file, and generate the HTML (Top job Adam!).

You will need your own Google Maps API Key.
Voila: http://www.google.com/apis/maps/signup.html

Edit the HTML, replace the Google maps key with your own, copy the HTML file to your web server, and presto!

Here's one I made earlier: here

@Krusty_Clown, tlhanks for the detailed post. Am a bit swamped with the deluge of GPS stuff coming down on me at the moment. Not much into high quality photos/cameras more just a good weather snapper, keeping it simple. your map of Ireland with popup and acess to full image is good and kinda what I would be aiming for,eventually.

I suppose I can use Picasa for these thumbnails and images?

turly

See also this boards.ie thread.

My first geotagging experiment - photos of Sherkin island - are up on Picasa, all described at http://fnarr.net/twp/?p=100.

As mentioned, I highly recommend locr for adding lat/long EXIF data once you have your waypoints downloaded from your GPS data logger; then a simple upload to Picasa will get you a map for free. No need to feck around with WMMX or with perl scripts (fun and all as that is :-) locr will also host your photos/maps, but I haven't tried that.

Krusty's comment about syncing your camera's clock with that of the GPS is something I wish I'd known when I started :-)

Krusty_Clown

turly wrote: »

Krusty's comment about syncing your camera's clock with that of the GPS is something I wish I'd known when I started :-)

The WMMX application allows you to create an off-set to synch the two after the fact, which is handy. Another handy tip, is to take a photo of anything, when you first start recording the tracklog.

Makes life a lot easier!

formatman

curious as to where you are buying .have bought the E51 ?

dohouch

formatman wrote: »

curious as to where you are buying .have bought the E51 ?

Haven't bought yet. Have been looking at German sites eg"www.technikdirekt.de" they have an English page as well. They are offering it for about €300 inclusive p&p to Ireland. Problem is with them their delivery time, about 3 weeks if you order at the moment.

Newly released N82 looks good but I reckon it will be about twice the price of E51. Interesting is that it will include "geotagging" as of the new year. Don't know if I want spend those kinda bucks.
There are many Ebays sites on "Ebay.de" with E51's. These are Ebays shops with good ratings and supplying proper invoice and new phones.