Sunday, February 22, 2009

Geotagging in iPhoto '09

So today I was able to figure out merge my GPS track from my Garmin Forerunner 405 watch, with my photostream. Not hard, just required some poking around on the internet for the right software and some trial and error in the process. I'm sure that there is an easier way, but this is the way that I made it work. So here's what I did:

1) Take photos; record GPS track.
2) Download GPS track to Garmin Training Center
3) Export TCX file to EveryTrail and create a trip
4) Download the GPX file from EveryTrail
5) Load new GPX file into GPSPhotoLinker
6) Connect camera to Mac, but hold off on importing photos to iPhoto
7) Drop pictures that are still on the camera to GPSPhotoLinker (Note: it turns out my camera was off by an hour; GPSPhotoLinker had an easy way of changing everything by an hour and then matching up with the GPS track.)
8) Manually link and save GPS coordinates of pictures.
9) Import pictures into iPhoto
10) Enjoy "Places" - it all worked.

A few notes:
- This would be much easier if Garmin allowed you to easily control the kind of file that you were exporting from their software. So far, I haven't found any options that would allow me to, though without the heartrate information, the PC version spat out a GPX file directly.
- iPhoto should be doing this directly: hello, anybody home at Apple; I thought they were all about making things easier. GPX is pretty universal.
- This is too cumbersome to worry about past photos, but I will definitely be adding this information to future streams. I will also be wearing the GPS watch on other photo expeditions (around DC or any other places that I'm taking pictures).

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