Geo Tagging Raw Images

Problem: As we, photographers, have almost crossed into the realm of location aware photo equipment (NOT) it’s easy (NOT) for us to note GEO coordinates of our artwork. You may raise a valid question of “why would I ever need to know the longitude and latitude of my pictures?”. The answer is simple. If your collection is close to mine (over 15,000 images) and you’ve taking pictures across the globe, it may become cumbersome and somewhat challenging pictures you’ve taken in Cairo, Egypt or Woodbury, New York. “Nonsense” you may be aspired to say, “I always tag my pictures in Adobe LightRoom, it only takes 30 seconds”. There’s nothing wrong with tagging your artifacts in your favorite post-processing software but what you’re definitely missing is not only the automation of an error-prone process but the actual GEO coordinates for every picture you’ve taken (http://public.fotki.com/bestnycphoto/weddings/anna-and-ben-wedding/image.html scroll down to the globe sign and select the online mapping software of your choice)

Now switch to “Satellite”, zoom in and view and be amazed.

Now, that you’re awed, imagine not having to do anything manually or time consuming to get this detail of information for every picture you take. In addition, the approach I’ll be elaborating on today will also generate a Description tag that will include City, State (where available) and Country for each image. Unfortunately, even though there’s an abundance of GPS Tagging software out there, non is really designed to handle RAW files (*.cr2, *.nef)

Solution: This is a 2 part solution. You need a GPS device with internal memory that will take ‘snapshots’ of your location while you shoot. You will also need software that will match the timecodes from your raw file’s IPTC collection of fields to timecodes on those location snapshots of your GPS device.

The first part is kind of easy, simply order a Data Logger GPS (I personally have this model: AMOD AGL 3080 – it doesn’t have the Bluetooth functionality but I only use it in tandem with my Canon 5D). The beauty of this device is that you don’t need to install any drivers on your computer to use it. You simply connect it via a mini-USB cable and copy the files off of it the same way you’d do it with a USB Key.

The second part is also easy, once the files are on you disk, the right software comes into play. At the time I was doing my research, there was only one FREE software product that would do what what we need with RAW files. That software is GPicSync. Once the software is downloaded and installed, the only optional step left to take is configure the gpicsync.conf file.

I’ve changed the utcoffset=-5 because I live in NY, I’ve also set maxtimedifference=300 to account for pictures I’ve taken before and after the GPS signal has been acquired.

The beauty of this solution is that you update the IPTC fields in your RAW files once (before or after importing them into LightRoom) and all future export to JPEGs will reflect it. These tags will show up in all main photo publishing sites such as fotki.com.

From now on, you’ll never misplace a picture from your trip to Venice, Italy or that quick stop you’ve made in Munich, Germany.