The iPhoto app that comes with every mac isn’t anywhere near as powerful as Lightroom or any other photo processing apps but does have a few cool things that I love to use. One being how geo-tagged images are displayed. With a GPS enabled camera (or smartphone like the iPhone) you can view your photos on a map where they were taken from. It’s really a fun way to visualize your photo galleries and comes in very handy when trying to remember exactly where you photo was taken. The only bummer with this is that most DSLR’s don’t have GPS in the cameras so for a majority of the images I take I can’t tag the location to the image. But thanks to a cool new app called gps4cam in the app store (available for the iPhone) you can now tag your images with a geotag. It’s a pretty simple process here is a quick review of this app.
What this app basically does is create a log of places you have been on your iPhone and then at the end of your shoot creates a QR code that you take a photo of. Then through a desktop software it takes that QR code and all of the info on the code and syncs all of your photos with the locations they were photographed at. When the app is first launched it gives you 4 different options on how to capture your location:
➜ Standard: one capture every 1, 5 or 10 minutes
➜ Precise: one capture every 30 second
➜ Energy saving: localization via GSM antennas (capture at every change of antenna)
➜ Manual: Capture by shaking the iPhone
For my testing I chose it to capture my location every 5 minutes. When you are done you click the Export button which creates a QR code image (similar to a barcode but holds much more info). Just take a photo of the QR code with your camera. You don’t even have to sync your cameras time and the iPhones time the QR code takes care of all syncing.
The next step is the only bummer since it’s one extra step in the post production. But I do think having location info on your images especially if you are traveling around on a shoot is definitely worth it. After you have imported your images then you have to run their desktop software (available on their website http://gps4cam.com/) which does take a little bit of time to process the images. It’s a simple thing to do, just select the folder where the images are stored (all images including the QR code image) and where you would like the saved files to go to. It processed them and will append the geo information to every shot (works with jpeg, raw and just about every file type).
Now that you have the images geo-tagged you can import them into iPhoto or any other software that can read the location information and see exactly where it was taken at. Some websites can also show geotagged info like Flickr, Panoramio or Tweetpic. It’s a very cool way to remember where a photo was taken at and a fun way to look back at where you have been and what you photographed there.
Check out more information about this app on their website http://gps4cam.com/ or get it now in the iTunes store.
Overall I think this app works really well and is a very good and inexpensive way to geotag all of your images.
If you are interested in a easy and inexpensive way to attach GPS info to your photos check out gps4cam – the iPhone app for photographers.
Are you a iPhone buff like I am? Let me know your favorite apps in the comments!
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This app looks really inferesting. Can’t wait to try it out. I use the iPhone app “Trails” to create very accurate tracks that can be exported and emailed from the app as .gpx files. Aperture is a powerful as Lightoom in my opinion, is know to be faster in more than one way (http://aperture.maccreate.com/), and has even better Geotagging features than iPhoto. It takes the .gpx file and maps all images taken during the same time frame as the file onto your map within Aperture. I love it.
Between manually dragging photos onto the map, using trails, using my external geotagger and using the feature in Aperture that allows you to steal a location from a single iPhone photo I have every image taken with my iPhone and DSLR in 2010 mapped in Aperture. Being able to locate every 5 star image keyworded with my sons name that was taken in our backyard this summer is great. You can also create map based slideshows in Aperture and iPhoto with Geotagged images. Geotagging will obviously be ubicudous
Accidentally submitted that last comment.
But I think it will be ubiquitous in the future. It’s just a bit of a pain that it’s not in our DSLRs yet.
I agree it will be so nice when this is finally a feature of all DSLR’s! Thanks for the comment.