Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Tagging Photos With GPS Coordinates

Posted by timothy on from the good-for-areas-51-through-67 dept.

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."

5 of 123 comments (clear)

  1. EXIF already supports GPS tags by neile · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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).

    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 .NET flavour.

    Neil

  2. Re:Sony Pro Cameras... by torgosan · · Score: 2, Insightful

    "...so you can tell where on the track the shot is...."

    or, more precisely, where the camera was when the photo was taken.

    --
    "If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand". -Milton F.
  3. Re:synchronize before and correlate later by Cryptnotic · · Score: 2, Insightful

    For certain people, it is important for the timestamp/position to be as exact as possible. For most applications, however, correlation of position to within 10 seconds (interpolated linearly) should be fine.

    I don't think you'd want to lug a 6 pound camera plus lenses up Longs Peak if you could carry a small camera and a small GPS unit. If you're not making poster-sized prints of your hiking trips, the correlation method would be fine. Just use a GPS unit that can store a track (i.e., points every 1 seconds or so).

    --
    My other first post is car post.
  4. Re:To make the location info complete... by GoRK · · Score: 2, Insightful

    GPS provides altitude if you have 4 satellites in view (and most units will continue to make determinations based on the last available altitude if not), so this is not a problem.

    Camera orientation can be determined extremely cheaply with a cheap electronic compass in a gimball and (optionally for more precision) a 3 axis accelerometer. The accelerometer can be pretty much the cheapest type available since it doesn't even have to be really precise, it just has to be able to determine the direction of gravity. This is easy to do particularly since the camera should have minimal acceleration during the shutter release. Plus it could also replace the little mercury switches that cameras use to determine portrait/landscape orientation. Spiffy!

  5. I'm confused by gooman · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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!"