Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with geotagging

Creating a map image from a geotagged image?

jaimev — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 10:12:12 -0800

Is there a Windows or OS X utility that takes a geotagged JPEG image and generates an image of a map containing a pushpin or dot showing the location where the image was taken? Also, it would be nice to control the size of the output image and the map scale.

I'm planning on taking a sequence of still images, geotagging them, stitching them together to create a movie (like this), but adding an overlay of a map image on the lower right corner showing the current location.

That's where this utility would come in - to generate the map overlay images.

Best way to track five kids.

bchaplin — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 04:29:30 -0800

One large family get-together, two three-story houses, two swimming pools, and five babies between the ages of one and three. What technical solutions would help us track all the kids...? Summer vacation at the beach for one week. One LARGE family get-together, two three-story houses, two swimming pools, and seven kids (five between the ages of one and three). All ambulatory. Of course we will have plenty of observant parents, baby gates, pool gates, and other safeguards. But still, I wonder if there is some additional solution that would help us guard against any panics involving missing kids.

As an aunt of one of them, I think of walkie talkies, geotagging, and the Brickhouse Child locator I've seen advertised on TV. I don't know which solutions would work with multiple kids, that are also reasonably priced (since this is only needed for the week). We will have a pretty strong wireless connection, an AT&T signal, lots of iPhones, and laptops.

Because the kids don't have well-developed verbal skills at this point, they are too young to protest any indignity we foist on them. The techie side of me thinks it would be fun to be able to outfit them with wristbands and see their locations in real-time...

Suggestions welcome.

geotagging the real world with your cell phone?

griffey — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 14:24:20 -0800

Help me find that awesome cellphone/real world data overlay project that I saw! At some point in the last 6 months, I saw a website talking about this amazing project that took a cellphone, connected it to a database of photos with metadata about the contents, and then allowed you to take a picture and have the service label the buildings or mountains or whatever was in the shot. A form of geotagging, but for the contents of the photo and not the photo itself.

It may have even done live overlay of video, where you film and the program ID's the objects based on a database of other photos.

It may have been for Android/the google phone...wasn't for iPhone, I don't think. My Google-fu is completely failing me, and I need the project for an article I'm in the middle of.

Help me, mefi!

How to auto-geotag mobile photos / track where I've been using GPS?

jeffrygardner — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 09:32:23 -0800

How to best use the GPS in my Palm 800w? I would like to 1) Automatically geotag my cameraphone photos and 2) Be able to track where and how far I've traveled for workouts. The phone has GPS and is capable of turn-by-turn directions, so I would think that it is capable of everything I mentioned.

Running Windows Mobile 6.1. Free/Cheap is preferred. Shozu doesn't work as far as the geotagging goes. Help?

What's the best way to geotag blog posts?

ascullion — Fri, 16 May 2008 06:06:10 -0800

What's the easiest way to geotag a blog post in MT4? Are there any decicated plugins, or any map-based technologies, that could make it easier for people who want to do it?

How to Digital Document a Trip Along the Oregon Trail?

LarryC — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 10:06:58 -0800

Cool, 2.0ish ways to document a trip along the Oregon Trail? I'll have a camera, a handheld GPS, a laptop, and an 8-year-old. In June my son and I will be taking a two week trip along the length of the Oregon Trail from Missouri to Oregon. I am a historian of the American West and I have been wanting to do this for years. I have also been playing around with digital history and I want to make the trip into an experiment in using digital technology and web applications to tell a story. I will have a laptop, various cameras, and a handheld GPS unit. I could also buy additional toys as needed. We will mix hotels with camping and I will probably not have internet access every day.

At a minimum I want to put selected photos, writing, and perhaps video online. It would be nice if this was in some sort of sequential format, maybe laid out on a map of the trail. And yet I don’t want to spend a ton of time processing this—I am hoping for something that I can do quickly, spending no more than an hour a night to document the days adventures. I have a Blogger blog devoted to Northwest History and technology, My preference is to use that, or at least build from it.

What are my options? In addition to blogging I have played around a little with putting photos in my Picassa Albums into Google Maps and that is fun and fairly easy. I bought a program named Robogeo that is supposed to automatically geotag my photos (you sync the clocks on your camera and GPS unit and feed the data into the program) but can’t get it to work, perhaps because it doesn’t seem to play nice with Magellan products. Right now my plan is to put my best photos into a Picassa Web album, map them, and write a blog entry each day. But I am open to suggestions.

(And I promise to either link whatever I do back here or post it in Projects.)

Geoblogging - how do I keep friends updated while I walk 100km for charity?

uk_giffo — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 19:52:41 -0800

In the summer me and three friends will be doing a 100km 30-hour walk for charity alongside lots of other teams. I was hoping to come up with a way in which friends, family and donors can check on our progress in real time, from afar. Ideally, what I would like to do is create a web page, which would incorporate a Google Maps, er, map. Within this map would be the route we've walked so far illustrated with chronological numbered points. Clicking on a numbered point would bring up maybe a quick comment or a photo that I will have posted from my GPS-capable phone (it's a Nokia N95). Or maybe the numbered point will be a hyperlink to a blog post further down the page. But anyway, it's not really the layout I'm having trouble envisaging, it's really how I would go about this that I'm having problems with.

I am pretty techy so am comfortable with some web and server programming but I'm not really looking to do this as a way of learning a new language so the easier, more out-of-the-box solution the better!

So, I'm interested in seeing examples of how this thing has been done before, as it must surely have been. Extra points for examples with technical explanations of how it's been done (i.e. via such and such API, with Javascript, or using Ruby on Rails)!

Many thanks.

Help me keep track of where I take my photos!

antifuse — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 09:47:19 -0800

What is the best, cheapest option to add GeoTagging to my Nikon D50 pictures? Basically, I just want the simplest, most basic GPS track-recorder you can give me. My googling has yielded less than optimal results. I know that the Nikon D50 doesn't have any way to do it in-camera, so my goal is to record my GPS track, then sync up the GPS track to the photos based on time taken, after the fact, using software (incidentally, recommendations on software also gladly accepted). The recorder doesn't even have to have a screen, it just has to be accurate and easy to download tracks to my PC.

Thanks!

Is it really that risky to take a GPS unit to Russia?

matildaben — Fri, 11 May 2007 10:06:32 -0800

This travel advisory from the State Department website, dated 1998, states that the use of GPS units is highly regulated in Russia and that it is risky to bring one unless it is fully documented. Now, GPS units are a lot more common today than they were in 1998. Do I really have to worry about this? I am planning a multi-country trip and I could mail myself the GPS ahead of time to my post-Russia destination if I had to. I am an amateur photographer and I use the unit to tag the location of photos I have taken.

GPS logger with big memory?

dmd — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 08:29:42 -0800

GPS with extremely large memory? I'm looking for something pretty much exactly like the Sony GPS-CS1 (reviewed here )... but that will allow me to download the data to a Mac when I'm done. (Though the GPS-CS1 mounts as a regular drive on a PC, it won't on a Mac...) Basically, I want something that will log to its internal memory for a very long time - I'm talking at least a few days - and then let me download that data. Time resolution doesn't have to be great - even only once a minute would be fine.

Discussed but not really answered here. I do not want to have to download my track religiously every day. Every couple days, maybe.