NL,
Very quickly my kit is becom...
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Camera Bags – They Are Always Too Small
Aperture 3 Places – Using A GPS
This is for Jason – How to use a handheld GPS and the Aperture 3 Places features to Geotag your images. Here is a quick 30 second clip showing you how stupidly simple it is. It was never “hard” but this is ridiculous.
One word or warning – make sure your GPS saves timestamp information. Mine is flakey – it saves timestamps in the active track log but seems to get rid of them if I “save” that track. It might be Garmin, who knows, I have not had time to investigate it. I just grab the active track off mine anyway.
RB
Fantastic quick demo, thanks for that. I take it Garmin do software for the Mac, or did you bluetooth it across.
They have a real piece of crap to download info etc. But lots of stuff will talk to it – some of the newer ones store directly accessible files via USB mass storage. One way or another it is not real difficult to grab the track data.
RB
Hey RB,
thanks for the tut, i was wondering witch Garmin GPS unit you used to create your .GPX file??
Sam,
I have a couple of different pieces of software – they all suck but the free garmin basecamp works fine.
RB
Sam – sorry a really old 76CSXi or something like that. The only reason I still have it is a bunch of marine maps that I have loaded for various parts of the world that are hard to get anywhere else and I have not checked into anything else lately – I have some other ones to but they all are about the same.
RB
RB,
Thanks a bunch. The GPS now goes in with the other gear. The problem for me was worrying about compatibility with a native Garmin (which is what I have) track file.
I’m glad that Apple (and you) made this simple.
See, it wasn’t just for me!
RB,
what about the NMEA-format? Aperture crashes when I read my NMEA-Track. Which NMEA-lines are needed?
Joerg Thomas
Joerg,
Grab yourself one of the free/opensource NMEA to GPX converters for the Mac.
RB
I use a Garmin eTrex Vista HCx and it logs to GPX files on a microSD card. The unit can also be put into USB device mode and shows up on the Mac as a USB drive.
My old Garmin GPS V would toss timestamps from saved track logs.
I’m not sure this works as shown, at least not for multi-day and multiple logs. Maybe with a single log it’s OK.
See other discussions.
Garmin saved logs don’t store timestamps. I assume this is old think based on expensive memory. But the some units can store to a microSD card and timestamps are stored there. A gpx file is stored for each day. Important for me since I take months long trips and Garmin won’t store a tracklog that long. Still not storing enough information though. Accuracy is missing for example.
If you travel much, I’ve found it easier to keep my camera on UTC and make the correction later.
If you have an iPhone, you can try using ApertureGPS, a simple application that records a track log that you can use with Aperture.
Hi guys, just found this site from a MacRumors forum thread. Thanks, RB! Your site is awesome. This is a great tutorial! I have a Nuvi and found via a Google search that many Nuvis do support it (they call them Trip Logs).
http://home.comcast.net/~ghayman3/garmin.gps/page6.htm
Anyone have any experience with Nuvis? I’d love to try, but its battery life is 3-4 hours and would poop out long before we finish our 8-12 hour outings when we’re traveling. It would be awesome if your iPhone would work like this, since that would be one less piece of gear we’d have to cart about.
On a side note, my wife and I were just in Australia with a 5DII and a Lumix GF1. Came back and merged the images by dates, and spent a few hours fixing time zone and clock synch issues when importing and merging the photos. If you add a GPS, you’d have a THIRD device to “sync” clocks with. A mini-nightmare? Maybe, but I’d sure love to add geotagging, it’s a way cool feature. I’ve decided next trip to synchronize all the clocks to local time and fix the time offsets when you come back.
David
Should have researched this before my last post. There is apparently a free iPhone app that will do geotracking – Instamapper. Anyone try this app?
Thanks for the guide!
Quick question though: Let’s say your GPS stops logging data at 12pm (batteries die). Will all photos taken after 12pm be mapped to the location at 12?
I’m wondering because the device I want to buy only gets 15 hours of battery life, and I was thinking I would only turn it on while I was “on the road” and let it map all the pictures taken at my destination to the same point.
@David Ahn: I recently used Instamapper on a cross-country road trip from Dallas, TX to Portland, OR.
It works a treat, and you can save the log from the Instamapper website in a few different formats, including GPX on my Mac it saves as .gpx.xml and you have to dump the .xml part before Aperture will see it as a .gpx file. Not sure if that’s a Safari thing, or just how the website does it.)
The website stores the most recent 100,000 waypoints, so that was plenty for the road trip. And it will show you 1 hour at a time when you look at the data log/map. I was able to export the entire track as a whole, and also able to break it up into individual time zones tracks.
I have, however, run into a bit of a snag with it. When I try to assign a group of pictures on the 2nd to last day of the trip (San Francisco to Klamath National Forest), no matter what time zone I set the saved track to, nor what time zone offset I assign to the pictures themselves (camera was in CDT the whole trip, Instamapper switches time zones when the iPhone switches time zones.) it always places the pictures offset by about 2 hours earlier.
It worked fine for the previous days (I haven’t tried the last day yet) with a little time zone swapping, but for this 2nd to last day it just doesn’t seem to make any difference.
The track in question is my PDT time zone track, and starts in Southern California, around the border between Airzona and California, and extends up to Portland, OR. I was able to assign pictures along the previous day (Southern Cali to San Francisco) without a problem, with the same track. I guess I could try exporting the points on the track just from San Francisco to Klamath Forest, and see if that makes any difference. If that still doesn’t work, I’m looking at manually dropping ~150 pics on the track, and not letting it place them automatically.
I’m having a real issue with this. The clock on my camera and laptop are sync’d and both are MDT. The GPS logs in UTC as you can see in the raw file. I’ve confirmed that the times in the log file are as expected. So my track point in the log looks something like this….
2010-06-05T21:07:27.00Z
The meta data on the picture has
2010-06-06 03:07:26
Since we are GMT -7 (MDT) everything should line up. Unfortunately when I import all my pictures show up +1 hour on the map.
Have you seen this or have any idea what could be causing it? I’m tempted to just keep my camera at UTC anyways. Then time zone shouldn’t matter.
Hey, thanks for the tip.
Regarding the save track function in the garmin devices, you’re right : they strip the time information from the saved track.
I use the “Log track to data card” function (in the Data Card Setup menu) to save them WITH the timestamps on the microSD, which has plenty of space free to save all your tracks.
To get them on your pc, use the USB Mass storage funtionnality of your GPS and grab them from the virtual HDD appearing in the Finder.
Use the “