As I mentioned in my last post, my Garmin eTrex Legend HCx has no real way to talk to my OS X laptop, where I do all of my photo processing. Since my Nikon D70s doesn’t support attaching a GPS to the camera and using it to embed GPS data in the EXIF tags, the fact that the USB connection on my Legend HCx wouldn’t be compatible with doing that is moot.
So, for a multitude of reasons, I can’t easily put my lattitude, longitude and elevation into my photos. The camera doesn’t support it, the GPS doesn’t support it and Garmin doesn’t support OS X. Luckily though, I’m not the only one that wants to do this. My friend Gowtham informed me of an application called GPSPhotoLinker which uses track logs to find the appropriate coordinates and enter that data into the photo’s EXIF data. (Track logs being a log stored by most GPS receivers containing information about longitude, latitude and elevation with a timestamp.)
Since my GPSr allows me to save these track logs to the microSD card I have installed, I can simply use a card reader to pull the logs. (Fear not though, the program claims to support pulling them off the device over USB.) Once I have the log on my machine, I simply load it into the program via the button at the top of the screen.
After that, load the photos. Upon going to the batch menu, you’ll be presented with some options. You can tell the program to ignore images with location data already in the EXIF tags (which I recommend) and set tolerances for how close a track point must be to the timestamp in the photo’s EXIF data. You can also set it to link to the nearest track point or a time-weighted average point.
Once you’re done, simply push the “Batch save to photos” button and sit back while you wait.
