Citylounge

Google Latitude as GPS tracker for your images

Alexander — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 10:28:37 +0000

During my last holidays I usually used my Wintec G-Rays GPS tracker to record my track. That allowed me to later inject GPS data into my photos taken with a regular camera, thus giving me additional information such as city, region and country. I love having this stuff all automated and don’t want to have to care for it or manually adding it.

One stumbling block I came across was the GPS tracker’s battery. It has to be charged every night. Ok not that big a thing, but as that device is so small and easily slid into any pocket, I often forgot taking it out in the evening and charging it. Thus it didn’t work the other day. That made me look out for something else.

I researched many solutions that get attached directly to your camera, like the Solmeta Geotagger . Well, I don’t like those. They are bulky, need a separate battery, two and only on a Nikon can directly inject the GPS data into the photos inside the camera. Not my thing.

Then I came across LatiPics. It just uses the tracking data you generate be having Google Latitude running on your smartphone. I immediately loved the idea! I always carry my smartphone around and it surely gets charged every night and I also had Google Latitude already running on it. Long story short: It works like a charm!

As I’m using Adobe Lightroom for all my photo related stuff, that solution had one drawback: The additional step I had to take, to get that GPS data into Lightroom. As of Version 4 Lightroom features an integrated GPS mapping tool and can also ready GPS track data and tag photos with that. Nice! You could just export your GPS tracks from Google Latitude (it’s called “location history” there), import it into Lightroom and have Lightroom tag your photos with it. Perfect.

Well, far away from perfect. Google Latitude exports your data as KML (Keyhole Map Data) files; Lightroom only reads GPX files. You could easily convert between those two formats using GPS Babel, but it seems like Google doesn’t write standard KML files (if found dozens of questions regarding that issue on the web), so GPS Babel only exports empty tracks from those Latitude track logs.

After researching quite a while on that issue, I finally stumbled upon a great free GPS track log conversion service: GPS Visualizer. You can just upload you Latitude exported KML files there and get perfect GPX files back. Those GPX files work perfectly well in Lightroom and allow you to tag your photos and also display as a track on the integrated map. Nice!

Adobe has some nice information and also a video available on how to use GPS track logs in Lightroom.

Any even better solution would be a Lightroom plugin that connects directly with Latitude via it’s API to fetch the GPS data from there without any export/import stuff. May be some time I find the time to do that…

When using this solution please keep in mind, that Google Latitude uses combinations of Wifi, cell tower and GPS data to determine your position. This method is gentle on your phone’s battery, but also inaccurate. You won’t get the same data as from a designated GPS tracker. On the other hand, it’s that much more convenient.

More #fun #parking your #car! Go to #Paris! :)

Alexander — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 08:48:58 +0000

More #fun #parking your #car! Go to #Paris!

Besides the cool content #google ‘s Think Quarterly has also very cool interface and makes good u…

Alexander — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 14:52:40 +0000

Besides the cool content #google ‘s Think Quarterly has also very cool interface and makes good use of #html5 and stuff like that. Nice one!

Creativity | Think Quarterly by Google Think Quarterly: The Creativity Issue

25 Incredibly Lucky Photographs Of Animals

Alexander — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 14:39:08 +0000

25 Incredibly Lucky Photographs Of Animals 25 Incredibly Lucky Photographs Of Animals: Some of these are incredibly skillful and well-planned; others are just one-in-a-million s…

TippExperience Part 2 — hilarious!

Alexander — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 09:07:02 +0000

TippExperience Part 2 — hilarious!

Tippexperience2
— YouTube

They’re back with a surprise guest…

Earth Hour 2012

Alexander — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 12:09:27 +0000

The WWF built a nice site illustrating current issues concerning our food and how we produce it. It’s worth a view from an ecological perspective, as well as from a website designer’s and developer’s perspective.

Finally an app to consolidate them all……

Alexander — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 14:49:58 +0000

Finally and app to consolidate them all… Have all your #gmail, #facebook, #linkedin, whatever contacts in one place. Still a bit of work to do, but already promising! #xobni #smarter

Smartr: Your smarter address book is waiting. By the people who brought you Xobni. Smartr automatically creates an address book using all your emails. Now for Gmail, Android, and iPhone.

Great news! #Lightroom 4 provides direct…

Alexander — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 07:42:23 +0000

Great news! #Lightroom 4 provides direct link to #Blurb for publishing books.

Lightroom 4 Public Beta: What’s New: Digital Photography Review Lightroom 4 introduces Process Version (PV) 2012. What’s a process version and why should you care? Well, it’s the image processing engine behind Lightroom (and Photoshop’s Adobe Camera Ra…

The one must-have #screenshot addition for…

Alexander — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 11:04:04 +0000

The one must-have #screenshot addition for #osx. Usually you won’t need any screenshot tools on osx as it does a fairly good job using cmd-shift-3/-4 for generating screenshots in pdf or png formats. What makes Screenshot PSD great is that it stores screenshots as psd and while preserving all objects on screen, like the Dock and windows, as separate layers, thus making it very easy to get just the part of the screen you really need.

Mac App Store – „ScreenShot PSD“

Reshared post from Christoph Bauer

Alexander — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 14:57:59 +0000

This #video is a #mustsee. Great explanation on #motivation vs #incentives.

Christoph Bauer originally shared this post:

If you do not already know the RSA Animate series, you should start watching them now. All of them.