Pictures on the map
Have you ever been wondering where we took photos? From now on, you may be able to see exactly where in the world I clicked that pic! I’ve added a new feature to the gallery which has added a new link to the left side of every album: “View album on a Map”. Click on that link, and you will see a map with pins showing where each picture was taken. For example, here are our last pictures.
Unfortunately the tags for pictures taken very close together are overlayed – to see everything you’ll have have Google Earth installed and click the “View in Google Earth” link.
How’s it done? (this is the techy part)
To make it work I have to always have my GPS with me (and turned on) when I take a picture. The camera must also have its internal clock set accurately to the time reported by the GPS (which in turn gets the time from the atomic clocks in the satellites). The GPS is set to record the time, and current location every few seconds to a log file on the memory card. That means that other than check that the camera clock is accurate, and have the GPS with me and on, there’s nothing special to do while I’m out and about.
When I get home, I copy the pictures from the camera, and the log file from the GPS, use the free tool gps correlate to match the times and locations from the GPS log to the times when the images were taken. If there was no log entry for the exact second when the picture was taken, a point is interpolated between the point before and after in the time-line. This location data is saved into the EXIF (meta data) headers of the image file, and when I upload the files to Gallery2, a cool module called Gallery2:Module:Map does the magic to use the Google Maps API to display a map with the points on it.
Tags: camera, gallery2, geotagging, gps, locate, map, photo, picture
March 17th, 2009 at 03:43
Nice!!