What is your preference for Geotagging

[kepardue]

EDITED : to give this post a more appropriate subject line. How do you Geotag -> What is your preference for Geotagging?



Just curious as to how you guys are using geotagging with your non-GPS-ified coordinates?

It occurs to me that a lot of the geotagging process is going to be very much manual for a long time, especially since you would have to be outside right before taking the picture even with a GPS-enabled camera to get this information.

So I'm wondering, are you guys just dropping a pin at an address and assigning that to a photo, or are you in some cases having multiple pins for the same general location? I'm specifically tagging some old college pictures of mine that are all at the same college address, but from looking at them I can place them more specifically where on campus they were taken. So now I just have like 5 different pins for my college. Seems slightly inefficient to me, but it's kind of interesting to see it. Is that how you guys are doing it?

Also, is there any way to modify the secondary tag that seems to be automatically generated? Interestingly enough, it recognizes a pin placed over a church as "United Church," but the church is actually "Harmony Church." I've changed the actual label for the tag, but now these photos shows up in the places browser as both Harmony Church AND United Church.

 

[ghettochris]

I like graphic converter and google earth, you just find the spot you want in google earth, select however many images you want in the graphic converter browser, and there's a "set gps from current google earth position" option in the menu. only works for jpeg I think. Also, if you previously imported into iphoto it won't see the change, but if you import after you're all good for places. I do general location first, then maybe go back and get specific on certain places. doing it with google earth is fun. Sucks that iphoto doesn't see the change though, but aperture does.

 

[JW008]

Thanks for the shameless bump, this is a good question.

I'm in the process of geotagging right now. I've found myself dropping the pin for places that I'm at quite a bit (home, parents' house, friends' houses, etc.) and for "notable" places (sports stadiums, monuments, etc.). Other than that, I'm just dropping pins for the city.

The only exception is that I spent a few months in Mexico in undergrad studying Mayan ruins around the Yucatan. I'm trying to specifically geotag all those places so that I can recreate the trip some day. It's time consuming as that I'm trying to recall minute details (it was a few years ago), but Google Maps is surprisingly accurate in Mexico, even for the more rural areas. I've been pretty pleased with how exact I can be.

One thing that I would have never thought of as being such a great feature until I started geotagging is the ability to resize the area after you drop a pin. I have a 2G iPhone, so the geotagging is not that accurate. I simply increase the area that the is considered a place (i.e. I extend the area that is "home"), and it picks up that I'm at home. Genius stuff. It's the little things, such as this, that make Apple and iLife great.

 

[rylin]

I consider a five hundred meter radius to be good enough.
My photos are already split into events, and if the geotagging is done for the central / most important piece of the event, that's fine by me.

I.e., if I'm walking a base trail around some mountains, having the moutain tagged is fine by me. Same thing with city shots.
If I'm at a touristy place (say, Sydney Opera House), tagging the Opera House works for me, even if I'm a bit further away.

Personally, I'm waiting for Casio's EX-F1 or Canon SX1 IS successor with built in GPS before I worry about Places too much.
I can't be bothered with a separate workflow just to have each individual photo tagged to the precise location it was taken.

 

[exoriare]

I think it all depends how obsessional you want to get.

I do a fair amount of mountain walking and have saved the tracks from my GPS in Memory Maps on a PC. The track not only gives the coordinates of the position but also the time. I've also titled my photos according to the date and time they were taken so it's fairly straightforward to work out exactly where I when the picture was taken. I was hoping that it would be possible to enter the coordinates manually into iPhoto and produce a pin from them in exactly the right place, but there doesn't seem to be a way to do this.

I notice it's possible to create identical place names, so while I might have 'Mountain' as the tag for the summit I might use 'Nr Mountain' for pics taken at various places nearby, though these will have their own pin. The downside of this is that when you view places as a list, only one of the duplicates shows up. So the workaround is 'Nr Mountain2' etc.

I've also noticed that while the coordinates captured by my Garmin GPS fit pretty well onto the Memory Maps, these don't coincide so well on the iPhoto map.

It's been fun plotting places for the first dozen or so pics, but I think I may get a bit bored with it before I get to the end of all several hundred of them.

 

[kinkster]

I have an iPhone 3G with no data service.

If im out of wifi range and taking some photos will it still grab the coordinates from the GPS satellites and tag the photos?

 

[g-7]

I have an iPhone 3G with no data service.

If im out of wifi range and taking some photos will it still grab the coordinates from the GPS satellites and tag the photos?

I guess not, because it seems to need the internet connection to find those satellites (its A-GPS, "assited GPS"). In theory, without the internet connection it should finally find them, so do a simple test: open Maps.app, tap the location button, wait and see if you get a blue dot. If so (even if the map itself is not showing), your position has been fixed and photos will be geotagged.

 

[kepardue]

That's typically been the habit that I've developed as well. When I started, I tried dropping pins exactly at the spot for most stuff (for instance, I can pick out on the satellite view where my family and I were standing on a parade route), but now I realize that places that are impractical to even assign a name to should be just tagged to the town name.

That said, there are a couple of cases where I do have random pins floating at a specific spot in a city, usually with the name "Other" assigned to them. For instances where there are pictures from two separate events at the location it's difficult though, since you don't know what "Other" you're selecting in the drop down until you've already selected it.

In another mildly-unrelated issue, I went through trying to tag pictures that my wife and I took on our honeymoon to Savannah years ago. I could have sworn that around 2 years ago I went through and wrote a description for all of the landmark pictures, writing in the name of the historic house and its significance. Now I find that iPhoto seems to have forgotten all of this, leaving me to scour the web for pictures of the houses to find their names and locations. It's bad enough that I have memory loss, I don't need iPhoto suffering from the same condition!

That said, it's amazing to look at these pictures on a map. I would LOVE to see some kind of feature where it drops the pins in chronologically. It would be neat to see how we progressed across the city during our vacation.

 

[alFR]

Also, is there any way to modify the secondary tag that seems to be automatically generated? Interestingly enough, it recognizes a pin placed over a church as "United Church," but the church is actually "Harmony Church." I've changed the actual label for the tag, but now these photos shows up in the places browser as both Harmony Church AND United Church.

I'm having 2 similar issues:

1. I have several photos that were taken at a local botanic gardens. The "New Place" Google search doesn't bring the location up when you search for it by name, but if you drop a pin at it the subheading for the tag is the name of the botanic garden. Great, but if you then give the "new place" a name (as you have to do) both the name of the place and the subheading show up in the places list, so you effectively have the same photos under 2 places. Annoying.
2. I have some photos that are geotagged automatically from my iPhone and other photos from other cameras taken at the same location that I've tagged manually. These 2 sets of photos appear in the places list separately unless I reassign the automatically-tagged iPhone photos to the same location as the manually-tagged ones. So, again I get 2 sets of photos taken at the same place appearing under separate tags in the places list.

I simply increase the area that the is considered a place (i.e. I extend the area that is "home"), and it picks up that I'm at home. Genius stuff. It's the little things, such as this, that make Apple and iLife great.

Do you mean that if you set an area as "Home", iPhoto goes through your previously-imported photos and renames the location of all the ones with a GPS location within that area as "Home" automatically? As noted above, this doesn't seem to happen for me, nor does it automatically tag newly-imported GPS-tagged photos as "Home" even if they're within that area.

Any workarounds for either of the above would be appreciated: otherwise I think I'll submit them as feedback to Apple and hope they fix them with an update.

 

[Mal]

I guess not, because it seems to need the internet connection to find those satellites (its A-GPS, "assited GPS"). In theory, without the internet connection it should finally find them, so do a simple test: open Maps.app, tap the location button, wait and see if you get a blue dot. If so (even if the map itself is not showing), your position has been fixed and photos will be geotagged.

The iPhone 3G isn't limited to A-GPS. It's an option to make the connection better when you're inside a building or getting a poor connection to the GPS satellites. If you're somewhere where you can pick up the GPS satellites, it won't matter if you have an internet connection, you'll still get geotagged photos.

jW