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Tagging Photos With GPS Coordinates
ptorrone writes "As part of a camera mod project to make a low-cost aerial photography device we started finding other uses for the camera hack. This first part of this series is tagging photos with GPS coordinates by automating a camera and GPS unit, it's a DIY Black Box for now with interesting applications and other uses. Ideally, this may encourage the next EXIF data schema to support GPS and other information."
This would be great if it also tagged the direction of the photo as well as the focal length.
That way some sort of virtual vacation wiki could be constructed from it.
It would also be nice to get altitude and the direction (in 3-D) the picture was taken.
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
Man, now PETA is gonna be all over them about that freakish cyborg dog-camera-thing. That's even worse than a monkey with wires coming out of his brain! Oh, the humanity!
Anyway, did they just do that so they could get a bunch of pictures of ASS?
Just then the floating disembodied head of Colonel Sanders started yelling Everything You Know Is Wrong!-Weird Al
Would be helpful for this http://www.confluence.org/
tagging photos with GPS coordinates
EXIF data schema
See exif.org for info.
Robophoto, OziExplorer support tagging the images from live GPS or from a log file.
But instead of a specific data source (the GPS unit), why not develop a standard and just have a data plug in the side of the cam to plug *whatever* data source into? GPS, keyboard, clock, speedometer, altimeter, whatever ...
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
I'd love to see this kind of thing built into cameras in the same way that Kodak is known to symbolically code film they sell to indicate the manufacture date of the film.
High resolution? No need for that... it's just a nice little trap for people trying to say a staged photo proves something that it really doesn't. If the original film indicates a year after the date you're claiming or that you were nowhere near the place you claim the photo was taken, then you're a liar and we can forget everything you had to say...
Doesn't 3m or IBM have the patent to "geostamping"... I wonder if the idea will take off enough to warrent a "geostamp" data type in sql?
meh
I wrote an app that tags my images based on GPS coordinates from my Garmin Forerunner. If you look in the EXIF spec you'll find that there are tags for latitude, longitude, and altitude (all of which the Forerunner gives you).
.NET flavour.
If you're using GDI+ on a Windows machine you can add the tags into your image pretty easily using either native code or your favourite
Neil
Now my insurance company will be able to take a picture of me when their little black box in my car senses I'm doing something illegal. Two shots that are both location and time stamped will provide exact proof of how fast I was going, nevermind the fact that there was a dead hooker in the back seat...
I don't know if anyone remembers this, but there was a series of stories on Slashdot about a guy that was taking high-quality photos of the California coastline to study erosion. He was sued by Barbra Streissand or someone for taking photos of her house. Anyway, his camera system recorded the location that the photos were taken using GPS. You should talk to him to see what he did.
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
This was done along time ago with Kodak cameras. The cameras actually run a scripting language. A script can be written to read from a serial port and superimpose the coordinates onto the picture much like the time/date stamps.
It worked well, but I was not able to get altitude nor direction data, I plan on the future hooking up two servos to allow for directional and azumuth data to be entered as well.
[blue] - The Ministry of Information approved this message...
All this did was record time and gps cordinates on the Garmin GPS unit, and have the camera continiously take pictures at a rate of 800 photos an hour. You still have to process the GPS data from the garmin unit and corrolate it with the app USAPhotoMaps to trace it out.
While new cameras offer GPS hookups, I imagine compatibility and logistics is a hassle.
Sometime, there'll be GPS in the camera, but then you have to take pictures with the camera itself in a position to receive GPS signal, and the long camera wakeup times will be even longer.
K I S S. Use a GPS that can be enhanced and specialized. Use a camera that is made for taking pictures. Correlate the data as convenient.
[
This would be really slick for storm-chasing. Often times you find yourself in the middle of [some flat state] taking pictures of a storm, and once you go home you may very well forget exactly where you were.
Also, I recently saw a TV show where they had to track down a killer based off of some digital pictures a murder victim had snapped shortly before getting killed. This technology would have made that murder much easier to solve... of course this probably has never happened in real life.
The biggest problem I see with GPS and cameras [digital] right now is battery life. Get GPS fixes from the necessary satellites can really run down your batteries fast. This is one area where camera phone may have a advantage; if they are GPS enabled (i.e. motorla iDen, etc.) and can use AGPS from the phone network, it may help with battery life. Nevertheless, as GPS receivers become more efficient, I can see them being integerated in to cameras to provide this type of information. It would actually make for a great vacation application. Take photos with GPS coords, upload photos to computer, computer has an app that "maps" your photos to where they were taken on a global/regional map. Throw in the dates and the app could construct a trip timelime showing all the locations where you took your photos (all the while playing the Family Vacation theme song).
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
The stuff in the link shows the principle
It seems that there is also a software based solution as well: http://www.inertia-llc.com/sandbox/topofusiontest/
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src code plz
It's almost enough to make me give up my Canon. Almost, except for all those pesky Canon lenses I have... :)
i d=7-6459-7204-7205.
"External GPS units that adhere to the NMEA 0183 specification are supported (the new MC-35 adapter cable, which connects to the 10-pin remote port on the camera and provides both an RS-232 serial port and 10-pin remote port, is required); latitude, longitude and altitude can be stored in a photo's metadata. The D2X's date and time can also be set automatically when a GPS unit is connected"
Full walkthrough of the new features in the D2x at http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/multi_page.asp?c
Neil
As mentioned by others, the three features that I've been salivating over is:
- Location
- Direction
- Altitude
Just the first one would be nice, but everything would be really neat.
Especially neat would be software that could take advantage of this information and create 3D models complete with textures by stitching together the files.
Imagine thousands of Flightgear fans all taking pictures from hilltops and airplanes and submitting them to a server that performs geometric transformations on the images, per the location data, and adds to a downloadable database of free scenery.
If you carry your GPSr with you while photographing, you can later load the track history onto your computer, and correlate the timestamps in the photos' EXIF data with the timestamps the GPSr stores in the track history.
I did this a while ago, with the program outputting an SVG map of my track history, with clickable dots everywhere a picture was taken. Click the dot, see the picture. I overlaid it all on a sattelite map of the city (Winnipeg), just because I could.
The critical step is that you need to take a photo of your GPSr displaying the time, so that the program can calculate the offset between the clocks in the two units. You just tell the app "Photo #6 was taken at 10:26:04" and everything else is automatic.
I wonder if that code survived my hard drive crash...
It looks like it works well for in car use or when weight is not an issue.
I'd like to see a stripped down version that could be more readily used in model plane applications.
A guy I work with has stripped down an old Palm Pilot and is hacking it to process air speed data in order to adjust the flaps. I don't know how much a glider could carry. If you could have automated flight, GPS, images and some form of communications that would be such a cool toy.
What kind of plane are you planning on mounting this thing on? Is it going to be stripped down further?
Why can't you just use a regular camera to photograph aerials?
It was great for crime photos, surveying, construction, etc. IIRC they had a snap on module later.
a l/tib/tib7061.jhtml?id=0.1.14.34.5.110&lc=en
http://www.kodak.com/global/en/service/profession
They seem to hava abandoned it. Silly to do for such a simple and useful feature. Hope the new project takes off.
Firefox &
your first problem was using too MUCH CAPS. that will generally get you modded troll regardless of your message.
and secondly, bitching about modding will only get you more troll points.
The Navman GPS4410 is a bluetooth GPS module, which has a battery life of 30 hours. See here for more details.
While it's primarily used for car navigation, you can get GPS NMEA data out of it (here is a good info site) which is the standard for GPS receivers.
It would be relatively easy to write a Palm/IPAQ/other app to record coordinates/tracks so you could tie them into your photos later.
Rob :)
Um, my Kodak DC390 (and other Digita-based cameras) supported this ages ago. Someone wrote a Digita app that talked to a GPS via the serial port and added EXIF tags to the images. Heck, I think that Kodak even sold a Garmin GPS and a special bracket that screwed into the tripod hole to hold the GPS.
Get GPS fixes from the necessary satellites can really run down your batteries fast.
What? Have you *used* a GPSr recently?
My iFinder gets approx. 11 hours of continuous use from a pair of NiMH 2100mAh AA's, at full power.. if I turn off WAAS, I get over 16 hours.
"Getting a GPS fix" is what GPS receivers *do*.
Even my old Magellan Colortrak got 6+ hours on a set of batteries.
If you think that GPSrs are inefficient, I'm guessing that you have an ETrex, and buy dollar-store alkalines.
as GPS receivers become more efficient
GPS receivers are already efficient. See above. Digital Cameras use *way* more battery power than a GPSr.
I can see them being integerated in to cameras to provide this type of information.
I can't see GPS receivers being integrated into most cameras in the near future, because of the size limitation - you still need somewhere to put that antenna and electronics. For specialized applications, it's useful, but a consumer-grade camera would simply be unweildy.
The biggest problem I see with GPS and cameras [digital] right now is battery life. Get GPS fixes from the necessary satellites can really run down your batteries fast.
Are you sure about that? My (rather old) Garmin handheld GPS runs for about 12 solid hours continuously on a set of new AA alkaline penlight batteries. But, my digital camera is only good for about 2 hours on a set of the same AA batteries, and only about 20 minutes if I leave its LCD screen turned on.
Do you know what a coralized link is?
Hint: it's not the process of listing one per line.
holy crap, while i was on my hour long drive home today i was thinking of this same topic. i was thinking of my trips to florida, alaska, arizona, japan that i've taken over the last year and how awesome it would be to get the GPS data from all those locations.
weird!!
This isn't my web site but I wish it were:
http://www.geosnapper.com/
There exist Japan only (not ever marketed in the US) point and shoot cameras that already record GPS data directly. (Rioch... and some other brand I haven't heard of.)
And of course various Nikon pro models have this capacity, such as that used here:
http://www.californiacoastline.org/
In the same vein, check out:
http://apps.ecy.wa.gov/shorephotos/index.html
I haven't evaluated this: http://www.robogeo.com/home/
But I do own this, and it works well, as advertised to get a GPS read for each time at which you take a picture: http://www.geospatialexperts.com/
At the above location, they happen to sell the Ricoh model that can record GPS out of the box.
...already do this. The modular slot in the back of the new blue-ray ProDisc XDCAM cameras (which record in either DVCAM or IMX 30/40/50mbit MPEG2 I-frame only) which is normally occupied by a diversity VHF wireless mic receiver will also accomodate Sony's GPS unit. The unit has no screen etc... it just slots in and metadata is tagged to the file. Great for covering golf, marathons etc so you can tell where on the track the shot is, or on which hole.
Take a look at: http://city.csail.mit.edu/city.html/ This project has been leveraging the annotation of GPS, as well as pose information for applications in computer vision and navigation.
In the past there was a kit for some Kodak cameras to connect a normal handheld GPS receiver with NEMA output to the serial port of the camera. I think they overlayed the coordiantes as text onto the picture. I doubt the newer cameras even have a serial port, but the old ones are dirt cheap now.
Here's an article on connecting a GPS to a Kodak digital SLR, and if you google a bit, you will find that most of the old digita-OS based cameras (e.g. DC290) support this.
This is not really a new way to do stuff, and as several other has pointed out, the EXIF-standard already has fields for geographical placement. A new dimension is provided in the data, and allows us to do a whole new range of applications. We've built a small application on Symbian OS (currently running under Personal Java, and another solution in development running under Symbian OS natively) which tags images, audio and other information on a cellular phone (we use the Ericsson P900) with location (provided by an gps with a bluetooth interface).
:)
We've done several interesting projects in relevance to this, and the probably biggest field of usage would be the utility and maintenance industry.
We're currently submitting the data from the phone, tagged with a location or a track, to a Java-based server. This server can in turn store the data locally to be retrieved from another phone with additional information (like a regular map) and/or pass the data on to a webserver where the repository can be browsed from a normal web browser. The application may be tested on The OneMap GeoMeta Browser Client. This is part of Project OneMap, a project where we aim to build a completly free and freely managed geodata repository.
There is still much work going on in this field, but the japanese are 2 years ahead of everyone else. Several of their phones already have built in GPS-receivers and tag the images they capture automagically (this was done as early as in 2002). There still isn't any regular consumer interest for this in Europe or the US, but we could all hope for a better future.
mats
One man's ceiling is another man's floor.
During my last motorcycle trip (http://photos.innersource.com/group/9976) all photos were GPS tagged and afterwards linked to satellite images/maps (http://maps.innersource.com/) While a manual process today, it would be fairly easy to automate it.
I hooked up my TiBook, a old Delorme Tripmate, my Treo, and my iSight and wrote a AppleScript that would put the GPS Cords in the picture that EvoCam took and then upload the picture and use XMLRPC to upload the coordinates to a database online.
The picture component of the system didn't work for my trip but the XMLRPC through the Treo worked great. It was a trip to the East Coast from Chicago, and it got everything till we hit the dark territory of PA, when we lost the connection.
It was a bloody mess of wires but it worked.
--- Kicking the Cheat since late 2002
Further, VERY early digital SLRs such as the ones made by Kodak(the ones with the giant packs underneath the Nikon body) had means of recording GPS coordinates with the image.
Far as I know, nobody ever cared to actually use it, which is why only a handful of cameras even claim to do it in their specs, and even if they do, there's no way to actually use it (no cables available, no software or instructions, etc).
I doubt that will ever change much. Yeah, it's a toy. Yeah, cameraphones have GPS and cameras now. But will anyone save a few 'bloggers' actually use it? Nope. Will those that do use it, do so for anything truly useful? Nope.
Please help metamoderate.
My smartphone does E911, so it's got a minimal GPS receiver that can receive the raw GPS signal data at the time it snaps a picture. I'd love an app that added those coordinates to the JPG comment field, then sent them over its CDMA net connection for locating by higher-powered software at the server.
--
make install -not war
Didn't Microsoft already patent this? The patent mentions GPS data.
Take photos with GPS coords, upload photos to computer, computer has an app that "maps" your photos to where they were taken on a global/regional map. Throw in the dates and the app could construct a trip timelime showing all the locations where you took your photos (all the while playing the Family Vacation theme song).
You should mail this to yourself, keep it sealed, and submit it as prior art when XYZ corp gets a patent for it.
Does this mean I'm my own Big Brother?
"... and here's a picture of me in my tin-foil hat at coordinates XY..."
"Kittens give Morbo gas!"
Hate to be a "been there... done that" type but my Nikon Coolpix 950 has done that for years. If a GPS putting out NMEA is attached to the serial port it places that last lat/lon/alt in the EXIF data.
:}
Works great... and has for several years
Telcos have alot of dark fibre in the States. Most people assume that's optical fibre...but it's actually moral fibre.
It was a 2002 Toshiba model with au/KDDI service. I could tag any photo with the GPS coordinates and mail it off to let people know where I was. It's nice to look back at old shots and be able to find the location on a map, but I'm sure it can be used for many more practical purposes.
This will be really exciting when very large quantities of people's images are brought together and the GPS data is used to make some crazy new kind of map / art / thing.
BE!
.
-shpoffo
http://gallery.menalto.com/modules.php?op=modload& name=News&file=index
"On a scale from 1 to 10, people are stupid"
Thanks. I stand corrected. Disregard my snide remark.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
These guys http://www.ballofdirt.com/ arrange your travel photos according to your GPS location.
Would be nice to see an automated system where you just upload your pre-location-tag'd images straight to your travel diary.
hmmmm "No dear, I have never been to that strip club"...
Check this out: http://www.redhensystems.com/products/multimedia_m apping_software/mediamapper/default.asp?sm=2
It records GPS coordinates to a video after it is encoded as sound. While playing it back, it deciphers the sound to obtain GPS coordinates, and geo-references entire video to a basemap as it was recorded.
I'm on the flight team at purdue university and this would be unbelievably useful for competition. We have an event called nav where a navigator plots a flight course given lats/longs and a hint on what they're looking for. They must plan times to the second and fuel burn to the tenth of a gallon. Not too hard until you realize your only items are a map, calculator, plotter (ruler with protractor), and a stopwatch. Combine this and a plane with no avionics it gets mighty hard to stay right on course. Before the competition, we scout the event area (100mi x 100mi) for prominent landmarks that can be used for navigation. Normally we fly and take a photo and write down the photo number and lat/long of the point. With this sort of device, we could cover a hell of a lot more area.
Currently, you can get an rss feed for certain tags on publicly available photos. It would be interesting if they extended this feature for GPS coordinates. (ie, if you want to see what's going on in Central Park, at your college, at Mt Everest, or at Mardi Gras.)
... In summary; more meta-data = cooler searches.
e ?tags=decay&format=rss_200
...Computer generated images would need fake GPS coordinates, NASA would need some other form of GPS for space...
It also would make for some interesting searches. In theory, if they kept track of points, vectors, and times... and lets say that you kept track of the same info, then you could search for all photos that include you!! Also, depending on if they store other meta-data, sorta like ID3 tags for MP3s, you could look for a GPS coordinates that best match a set of keywords.
Example, if you did a search for Lego, the first result would probably be Lego land. (Lots and lots of vacation pics.) The next 2-5 would probably be big, famous Lego artworks that lots of people would take pictures of. You could do a search for waterfalls and find all the most picturesque waterfalls in your area.
http://flickr.com/services/feeds/
http://flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gn
On the downside, you have to be careful with your meta-data. I can only imagine stalkers having a field day once GPS coordinates are embedded into pictures.
The Nikon D2H and D2X already support this out of the box...
I keep waiting for someone else to point this out...
Cameras timestamp their photos. GPSs can maintain tracklogs of where they go with timestamps. You don't have to connect them with a tangle of wires. Just keeep the time on your camera relatively close to right and post process the tracklog when you download the pictures.
Some over two years ago when the Nikon D1H and D1X came with support for GPS ;) I quote from http://www.naturfotograf.com/D2H_rev01.html
"Support for GPS, a very nice feature of D1X and D1H, has quite unexpectedly been removed from D2H."
So this isn't exactly a new thing though..
http://wwmx.org/
The World Wide Media Exchange project is geared towards sharing GeoCoded Photos. The project is cool but I found more interesing the downloads section which have some slick tools for downloading tracks from Garmin GPS devices as well for stamping images with location info. A GPS is not required for geocoding the images since the Location Stamping tool allows for manual stamping using MapPoint maps. There is also a tool for creating a web album "travelogue" for showing off your geocoded pictures along with a map.
Check out this travelogue which was generated using one of the tools: http://www.splatt.com.au/wwmx/melb_2003_04/
The 'exif' program from the libexif project can modify exif tags. libexif can also modify the gps tags, but the exif program doesn't support that, so you'll have to write some code yourself.
The first thing I thought of when reading the article (I know.. I'm not supposed to read it before commenting...) was to imagine the chat-room housewife who doesn't realize that her camera is capturing her GPS coordinates as she does a strip show for the boys in a chatroom. Next thing you know, 100 local geeks converge on her house - "Is that your GPS in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?"
Or the pervert who captures kiddie porn has inadvertantly given his location when he posts it on the web.
It's a cool idea, and obviously could be spoofed to avoid such problems. I just don't look forward to the pop-ups on my camera telling me "Warning, your camera may be broadcasting your GPS coordinates".
most half decent camera's allow you to take a photo using a remote flash so
being essentially a switch it shouldnt be too difficult to use this as a trigger
signal "picture taken" to trigger the collection of time stamped gps data.
just a thought
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
The story I have heard is that it was a military request, though civil engineers pushed for it too.
which is why
(1) that kodak also recorded which direction it was looking
(2) the exif format can includes full GPS constellation and time info, as well as just lat/long -so you can do post-processing to get a better position
and you can tag your pictures.
Here's a way cool example:
http://www.downgoesthesystem.com/devzone/exiftest/ final/
No need, it's now SlashArchived with date and time stamp (and when Google cache it it will be GoogleArchived as well - long enough for the Wayback Machine to get it too?)
The web can usefully (and worryingly/annoyingly) persistent.
and a bluetooth camera. Write a bit of software on the camera to snag 1) the time and 2) the co-ordinates.
You could then keep the GPS in your pocket or strapped on your backpack.
You should check out Hummingbird hardware software solution. An applied usage is to map locations with pictures. Based on the camera GPS location and measured settings of the focal settings and length of the lens. Items in a picture can be mapped also. This would allow sychronous pictures to be taken and soon we will have the exact coordinates of most addresses. Pretty cool stuff!! Turbo-Mapquest here we come!! http://www.hummingbird.com/solutions/gis.html
Over-n-out
SWAT-LEAD
Did you mean using the camera's focal length as a rangefinder -- i.e. determine the distance of the subject from the camera? That's a good idea!
Summarizing:
1. A 2 axis accelerometer (mounted on camera, to get orientation of body)
2. An electronic compass (mounted on camera, to get absolute heading - GPS isn't good for this when walking)
3. GPS coordinates (to get Lat., Long., altitude, time)
4. Camera focus and zoom information (rangefinder)
Data from these 4 things gives enough information for different pictures of one area (taken by different people) to be automatically combined (say, multiple pictures of the Mount Fuji are processed to generate a topographical map).
Since time is also recorded, one could observe a particular subject change over time. A movie clip (or simply an animated GIF) showing the changes speeded up would be highly cool.
As an aside, does anyone have links to similar clip about earth? Satellites started taking pictures of the earth since the 1960s. It would be interesting to see a timestream of things like forest cover change.
I work for the Scientific Imaging Systems group at Eastman Kodak. http://www.kodak.com/go/scientific. Several years ago I conceived of, and wrote the software for a product we called the Field Imaging System FIS265. It was based on the DC265 which was the first Kodak camera to run the DigitaOS. I wrote a suite of scripts that ran in the camera and a plug in for the popular GIS mapping software ArcView. Another group at Kodak developed a nice bracket that held the camera together with a Garmin GPS III+. When you pressed the shutter button, the script captured the current GPS data and added a tag to the EXIF image header. Images could be transmitted anywhere and the GPS data would not be lost. The ArcView plug-in made it easy to add point symbols to any map at the location of each image capture. Click on a symbol and you would instantly see the image taken at that location. Pretty slick (IMHO). A very complete review, with pictures of the FIS265, and a tour of how it is used, can be found here: http://spatialnews.geocomm.com/newsletter/issue12/ demofis265.html
The same scripts would also run in a DC290. But the DC290's rev of the DigitaOS also made it possible to parse NEMA output from any GPS (I wrote scripts for that, too.)
For other reasons, Kodak decided not to use Digita in its future cameras, so the FIS265 was eventually discontinued: http://www.kodak.com/US/en/health/scientific/produ cts/fis265/ This was a shame, because shortly after that, the US military dropped SA and the system performance was about 5 times better at no extra cost!
-Doug
I have a 950 and a few generations of Garmen GPS sets. The folklore as represented by Google searchs on the web and in groups is that Nikon never implemented the "GPS in" feature although it was mentioned in their initial advertising for the 950. I missed the feature in the advertising to be honest or would have been trying to get it work for it all these years. Nikon also claimed a GPS in capability for a older Digital SLR, the E3. I have the Fuji version of that one and could never get the GPS to work there either.
I would appreciate a few details as to the cable connection, any camera settings, and the software required to access the GPS data.