Geographical Placement (GeoTagging) your Photos in Google Earth

Geographical Placement (GeoTagging) your Photos in Google Earth
Author: Brian, 09Dec2007 – www.zumoforums.com

After reading a couple of posts about people taking photographs whilst out and about with their Zumo’s and then once they had got home they wanted to know how could they remember exactly where they had taken their photographs? Most modern digital camera’s save the time and date when each photo is taken, this is known as EXIF data and is embedded within each photo. We can use some software to help us accomplish this – which is often referred to as GeoTagging – we need to ensure the camera’s time & date is set the same as the GPS’s to do this accurately .. though there is the ability to take into account a known offset in time within some software.
There are several pieces of software available to enable us to do this, here I am using Photomapper from http://software.copiks.se/photomapper/index.php?lang=EN

Recently I was on holiday in Monte Carlo in Monaco, where I had taken some photographs. On this particular holiday I had taken my Zumo with me and had pre-progammed it with several waypoints of the best sightseeing places, I then used the Zumo in Off-road mode to guide me around on foot – this worked really well. It is only now many months later that I decided to log geographically (with Google Earth) where I took some of these photos.

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Firstly (see Pic1 below – click to enlarge) you need to import the relevant Track-Log from the Zumo into Mapsource, hook up the Zumo to the PC via the USB port, browse to the Zumo / Garmin / GPX / Archive folder, here you will find several ‘archived’ .gpx files, contained within these are your Track-Logs of previous travels. Right clicking and selecting Properties will tell when each file was created (higher numbered archived .gpx files are the newer ones) – which will give you a good idea which of your Track-Logs are contained within that particular file.
Each .gpx file will likely contain dozens of Track-Logs, in my example (Pic1) I highlighted the relevant ones, deleted the rest and resaved as a new .gpx file (monaco.gpx) to my desktop – this I did within Mapsource. I also saved my photo’s to my desktop and placed in a folder named Monaco (for this example).

In PhotoMapper, click on File / Import GPS Data then select the Track-Log file (monaco.gpx here), then click on File / Import Images and browse to where your photo’s are saved .. the results can be seen in Pic2 below. In my example the overhead view of Monaco can be seen at the right hand side of the Google Earth (GE) preview, the straight line is where I was walking in the Formula 1 tunnel and the GPS signal was lost ! Clicking on a photo’s filename will display the photo and show its location as a red circle on the GE image.

Next (Pic3), check to see if you need to include a time offset for the difference between the camera’s time and the Zumo’s time, in my example the camera was 8 minutes fast so I entered this as the offset to ensure the photo’s are located in the correct places, then highlight all the photo’s filenames, click Export to Google Earth, this will create a GE .kmz file, this will contain the locations of where the photo’s were took AND thumb-nails of the photo’s (there is no need to used the URL option in PhotoMapper for your photo’s to be stored elsewhere).

All you need to do now is click on your newly created .kmz file (I used monaco.kmz in this example), and if you have GE installed on your computer, GE will open up with a satellite view in the relevant region (see Pic4 below). In the left-hand side of GE you will find Temporary Places, browsing beneath here you will find reference to your photo’s. To the right you can see the satellite overhead image with icons of the photo’s locations, clicking on these icons will display the photographs.

Click here to download my example monaco.kmz file, (Rename from monaco.zip to monaco.kmz).

Download PhotoMapper:
http://software.copiks.se/photomapper/index.php?lang=EN

Picasa is an alternative application to PhotoMapper and is one of the many free applications you can choose from the excellent Google Pack