Friday, August 14, 2009

Geosetter - GPS Tagging for my Photos

"GeoSetter is a freeware tool for Windows for showing and changing geo data of image files " developed by Friedemann Schmidt. It can be found here. It has many features as explained on the website. I find myself using only a couple of the features.They are: 1) Searching google maps for a particular location and 2) Updating my photo's exif data with the gps coordinates. That's all I use it for. I don't import track files or any thing else.

My procedure for using geosetter is as follows:

1) Open Geosetter
2) Navigate to my Compact Flash card
3) Search for a particular location
4) Select one or more images with this location
5) Copy the gps data to the raw files
6) Create a "favorite" if I'm likely to visit this location again
7) Repeat 3-6 until all images have been tagged

This may seem a bit time consuming, but it depends on how you shoot and how often you move your images from the CF card to the computer. I normally will have a group of shots, say from around my house, or a particular lake, park, waterfall, etc. I will find the location on google maps inside geosetter and transfer the info to the files. I believe it puts the data in sidecar files.

Once I have geotagged all the files, I import my files as DNG's onto my hardrive using Lightroom. DNG files store all the data, so the sidecar files are history.

Most of the time, I am not concerned with the exact location the picture was taken. So if I have photos from a small town I will have one location for the entire town.

Geosetter allows you to create "favorites". This comes in handy, as I visit the same locations frequently throughout the year. Something else that is handy is that you can delete images from the thumbnail viewer inside geosetter. This allows me to get rid of "really bad" images at the card level. This cuts down on the number of images to be sorted on import into LR.

Geosetter has become a habitual part of my workflow now. I thinks it fits my needs adequately and works without any hiccups. If you are interested in geotagging your images you may want to give it a look.

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