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GeoTagger Adds Positioning Info to Snapshots
Richard Jelbert writes "Check out this hardware device to geo-tag your photos to help share / manage your photos using Google maps. The Jelbert GeoTagger device records the latitude and longitude and compass direction of every photo you take. It connects to the camera flash shoe and stores the geo metadata on an SD memory card.
Geotagging is becomeing more and more popular with sites like Flickr supporting geotagging via Google Earth interface. Hardware geotagers save you the effort of geo-tagging the images manually after taking the shot. The Sony geotagger is a great step forward but the Jelbert GeoTagger also records direction data."
Should work inversely too, so that when i check out my street on google earth it shows pictures of my neighbours sunbathing.
my capcha was condom
Christ, could the summary sound any more like a PR press release?
Argh.
is the angle with the horizontal. With all this information it should be relatively easy to build a 2D/3D map from the pictures you collect.
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There are *many* alternatives. Read those stories:
Flickr Adds Geotagging
Geotagged Photo Browsing Tools for Google Earth
Picasa Photos in Google Earth
and the most important one:
Info on Geocoding Photos which links (in 'related links') to numerous other sources of info.
Today, you can tag photos using Picasa and Google Earth, Yahoo! and Flickr, or other alternatives such as GPS hardware to geotag your photos directly.
Animoog.org
It's a SONY.
I just heard the other day about some kind of 'mark' that digital cameras put on all images, that notate what type camera you have...and some of the programs put registration information on the images (name, etc).
I'm not sure I want all that meta data on pictures I take...just a simple picture thank you.
(I forgot the name of that tag..starts with an "E" I think.
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Doubtful, what with Flickr being owned by Yahoo and all.
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I wrote a command line application for windows that reads track information off of Garmin and Megellan GPSs (or it can read .gpx files) and then uses that information to update the exif information in the image files based on timestamp information. I'm using it with flickr and it works great. You do need to allow flickr to use exif data here: www.flickr.com/account/geo/exif. Since it updates exif information in jpg files it should work with any photo sharing tools.
This was meant to be a free simple application that you can just run on all your photos and I think it is just that. No bells, no whistles. It just gets exif data added to all the photos you just took in a quick easy manor.
You can download GeoPhoto Batcher with source code from: http://moesphoto.glacialwanderer.com/
Hobby Robotics
If you already own a GPS, there are several software-only solutions to perform the same function. Just sync your camera's clock to the GPS clock, and turn on the GPS tracking function. The software will link up locations by matching the photo's time-stamp with the tracklog time-stamp.
Until my digital camera automatically tags all photos with the information then uploads them wirelessly and automatically up to my flickr or other site, then logs the photos into google earth or whatever. I can't be arsed. Really all this is completely automatable so why would I bother?
Deleted
Camera location (GPS) and orientation (yaw, pitch, and roll) would give you a unique position.
You mean "EXIF"? And yes, EXIF really is pretty damn useful for anyone who wants to actually know what type of comera setup was used, exposure info, focal length, whether a flash fired, etc...
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EXIF
Most of the information is both innocuous and helpful (at least to other photographers). You can disable things like camera serial number and all that. But keep in mind that it is possible to prove that two pictures came from the same camera by analyzing the sensor noise, so if even one picture ever taken with your camera is positively correlated with your real identity, any entity sufficiently motivated could tie any other picture to that camera, assuming it hasn’t been altered too badly by resampling, multiple (overly aggressive) JPEG compressions, and other transformations significant enough to destroy those noise patterns.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
Pratical Uses? I can think of quite a few. When I go on vacation, I find the meta data from digital very useful. Most cameras will put EXIF data in the image recording such things as the specific camera you shoot with, your exposure time, aperature, what mode you shot with... You can use it to adjust how you take your shots if you shot with different settings.
As far as geotagging, it gives you the flexibility to organize your photos by location, and add in that info to your photo. I went on a month long trip and can't remember where every shot I took was. This would have been an excellent way of keeping track without requiring me to take additional notes to correlate back to my photos.
Grazer is now free The tool synchronizes GPS location information in GPX format and matches the timestamp of the location information with the timestamp on the EXIF header of your photos.
http://www.i4u.com/article6502.html
Sony has released a GPS Geotagger gadget: Using time and location recordings from Sony's GPS-CS1 GPS device and the time stamp from a Sony digital still camera or camcorder, you can plot your digital images to a map and pinpoint exactly where you've been.
http://www.i4u.com/article6207.html
Of course GPS does not work inside buildings. The website says other hardware used 'bad' ways to retrieve inside-building location information, but they give no clue on how they do it themselves! How can I judge if their system is better?!
Additionnaly, most of the work is done by RoboGeo, which must be purchased seperately.
Animoog.org
A few possible uses:
-> You can now have software track the route you took while on vacation as you snapped pictures
-> If you find a camera, you can now track the route the previous owner took before losing their new camera, and know exactly where their house is with the nifty bigscreen tv (in the background of a shot taken at home for example)
-> If you find a corpse next to the road with one of these cameras, you can tell if they were standing in the road taking pictures when they got hit or if the car had to swerve off the road to hit them
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Is this really that useful for the public in general...?
Of course -- wives can find out where their cheating husbands are taking the naughty pictures they find on their home computer, anyone can determine where the picture someone posted on an on-line dating service was taken (she says she's in Pocatello, ID, but all her pictures are from Bozeman, MT!), etc. A multitude of uses in the home!
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So just strip it off. It's in plain text, the format is well documented, you can even get a ready made python module for reading it. Not to mention lots and lots of software both free and otherwise for editing and deleting EXIF tags.
I just heard the other day about some kind of 'mark' that digital cameras put on all images, that notate what type camera you have...and some of the programs put registration information on the images (name, etc).
You're thinking of Exif data. It contains information regarding a specific image: the camera model, the date and time of the photo and all sorts of potentially useful photographic details -- the ISO, aperture used, shutter speed, focal length, etc.
This can be extremely useful stuff if you're a semi-serious photographer. Whenever I run across a photo that I like, that produces a neat visual effect or was taken under circumstances I generally have problems with, I can look at the EXIF data and see how it was done. This also works in reverse -- when I fuck up and take a slew of bad photos, I can look at the EXIF data and work out what I did wrong so I (hopefully) don't make the same mistake again.
I'm not sure why you wouldn't want this sort of metadata saved in your pictures; even if it's not useful to you, it may be useful to other people who look at your pictures. It's not as if it's reporting your full legal name and social security number or anything.
That aside, I can think of a few applications where having GPS data automagically stored could be useful:
Reshoots -- I have a few "landscape"-style photos that would be great images if I could only go back and fix something about how I shot them, but I don't know specifically where I was when I took them.
Copycatting -- Same as above, but with someone else's shots. Retaking photos from other people that you enjoy is an excellent way to learn about how to look at a situation and frame a shot. For example, people have spent a lot of time and effort to figure out where and when Ansel Adams took some of his more famous pics.
Memory Aid -- A dozen years from now when you look at your photos, are you going to remember specifically where you were during that Scotland vacation? Extra info -- location data included -- can help you out there.
Official uses -- Obviously helpful to efforts like forensic investigations, large-scale insurance adjusting (especially after something like Katrina) and etc.
Obviously, none of this is "mission critical" stuff, but like EXIF data it's nice to have and is another tool you can use to make yourself a better photographer.
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Don't know about everyone else, but it would be a godsend for some architects. Many progressive architecture and/or exterior design firms are taking photos of an existing site and superimposing a 3D modelled rendering of the finished building or renovations over the site. In order for the modeller and/or renderer to get the photo match down (positioning, shadows, etc.), you need to specify stuff like time of day the photo was taking, geographic coordinates, measurements, camera angle, etc. The more information the camera can store automatically in EXIF tags, the less information the modelling person has to enter by hand. If the information is in some sort of standard format, the modeller may even be able to load the data automatically from the EXIF tags, saving tons of effort getting the photo to match.
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Maybe you want to sort photographs based on where you took them.
“Give me all the pictures I took at Yosemite National Park.”
Nah, too much of a stretch.
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Um, most handheld digital cameras dont have a flash shoe, so this is sort of irrelevant.
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Yet another way for people to voluntarily give up any sort of privacy they had left
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The pro side is the device retains compatibility with classic film slrs ; the con side, it's way too big for my OM1 ! Couldn't have they put just the GPS receiver part on the hot shoe, and use whatever link (be it bluetooth or even a wire) to hold the recorder in a pocket ? As it is, I don't see how you can snap a pic without a tripod. The weight would necessarily tilt and shake the body.
The summary clearly states that it's not a SONY.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Richard Akerman also has an excellent summary on the currently available software/hardware to geotag photos.
Now that is one slick idea.
How does it deal with photos that are taken at a time between GPS waypoints? I assume that the 'track files' produced by the GPS are a series of fixed positions and timestamps; e.g. x1,y1,z1,t1;x2,y2,z2,t2, where delta-t varies depending on the resolution you have the GPS recording at. What happens if you take a photo at t1.5? Does it pick the nearest timestamp, or does it interpolate a vector between the two points and estimate one's position at the time? Seems like it could be significant which method is used, because of gaps in the track that might occur during loss of signal, etc.
Anyway, very cool. I'd also point out (just to everyone else) that based on the readme on the download page, it's licensed under the GPL. Maybe some enterprising person will make a version for systems other than Linux? I could see something like that being a slick feature in an iPhoto-like management app.
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It be true. When you upload your photos to Flickr it will display all that info for you and your friends. I don't care if people know what type of camera I have and what exposure settings I use.
Can I bum a sig?
With all that information in hand, it would be possible to collect, say, thousands of photographs from different sources and stitch together a 3-d Google Earth-esque 3d map of the world from human perspective.
With error correcting techniques, you could eliminate the problems of people, cars, etc. in a shot, and it could even be integrated into satellite-based systems like Google Earth.
Every day, thousands of tourists are taking pictures from all different angles of the Statue of Liberty, and other places in New York. Imagine if, instead of using polygon-based approximations, you could have a photorealistic 3-d rendering of the SoL to include in your artwork, video game or other visual media.
Google is aleady doing something like this by sending laser trucks around to major cities, but if you put this sort of porcessing power into all the cameras in the world, then (a) you don't need laser-toting trucks, and (b) you can get the data from all sorts of locations where such a truck could never go.
The CB App. What's your 20?
Yeah (as other people have pointed out) the 3D modeling applications of this are pretty big.
My question is, does the EXIF specification have a place for an "azimuth" variable? I know it has Lat/Lon and time, but azimuth is really the key if you want to be able to reconstruct a model of a place. You need to at least know where the camera was and where it was pointing. Granted, most GPS units won't give you this information (a few that have magnetic compasses might) but it would be good to at least have the place in the format for it to go later.
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Using the hot shoe is a great hack. The device looks kind of clunky and the need to take action to integrate the geo-tagging data with the photos is a pain, but more and better will follow, right?
It is a person's choice to:
1) Use such a device
2) Share the resulting data with others
Only you can protect your privacy. Don't blame the technology.
Get a photograph GeoTagged at ll=61.26426,-149.851316. You are not allowed to wear any uniform while doing it.
Okay, so we use our vast and ubiquitous sources of geographic data to look up interesting data about those coordinates and then cache that. It would not be difficult to figure out that our point falls within a particular green blob in California. With virtually no effort than to actually put the pieces together, we could eliminate a big chunk of the work required to properly annotate pictures. It would almost be trivial to take these coordinates, along with the camera orientation, and determine all the interesting features. I would be able to not only find pictures in the park, but also whether or not the camera was pointed at El Capitan or Bridal Vale. Simply given a vector (the view point), the coordinates of known landmarks, and the width and height of the view field, this can all be easily computed. Suddenly we have a lot more useful and more importantly structured metadata to work with that is even future proof. It is easily improved as what we know about the scene increases. The geographic data provides us with a reference point for the context. Following that, I do not understand your remaining points.
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This "product" is completely bogus.
From the article:
This thing costs 149 british pounds, and ALL IT IS is a serial port connected to a processor that translates NMEA sentences to location and directional information, connected to an SD slot. You have to buy a GPS unit for it to work!
Hey, at least for 150USD sony throws in the GPS!
You'd be better off rolling your own with this for a heckuva lot cheaper, and it comes with the GPS too! But you lose directional information. boohoo! :P
For the lazy though, the sony unit still wins.
A little more practical and mundane than that: think traffic accidents, speeding tickets.
Someone had to do it.
One of the most obvious uses is in making travel photography easier. There are specific travel blog sites like TripDiary that let you set up a travel journal and specify the geographic locations at which your entries occur. A GPS device would make that easier, as the data can then be extracted from the photos. When you're showing off your travels to family/friends, showing them where you were on a map (especially with satellite footage) is pretty cool.
idk... the technology is great, don't get me wrong, but people are idiots and entities such as the government take advantage of that.
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Non-Linux Penguins ?
That thing is gonna cost you nearly $300 US a pop AND you have to purchase a software to use it. Way too much for your everyday user (hiker/boy scouts) IMHO, I can see a nitch market but somehow I don't see this product to take off anytime soon. However, I do like the concept or marking the photographs with geographical locations but unless they start to have built-in GPS system inside the everyday point-and-click cameras, I don't see it becoming very popular.
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Wow this is great. By coincidence I typed a memo into my mobile phone, a napkin-back spec for a device that has what this one does, and a week later it appears all finished on slashfot! Well, they are perhaps missing one component but I am not going to post it here. I think I'm going to try it again.
Friends don't let friends buy Sony. They probably embed the geodata in the image pixels so they can always find you.
"Fix it"
There are already a few Ricoh cameras which can connect to a GPS device (bluetooth or serial, I assume) so this is a pretty stupid way to get GPS info on photos. I can't find the official product page, but here's a random link: Caplio 500SE B/W. I don't have one so I don't really know how exactly they work, but I'd guess better than this hack.
I was thinking of something similar to this a couple of years ago. In addition to a GPS device inside the camera, imagine a database of historical landmarks, and accompanying background information. If your GPS coordinates fall inside pre-defined zones surrounding a landmark, and you are facing the landmark (according to the compass direction), then your camera could tell you what you were looking at. Another press of a button could bring up a few screens of facts and historical data about that particular location, and even suggest points of interest located nearby. Digital camera screens are large enough now to display several lines of legible text. If you were so inclined, you could appear to be an incredibly knowledgeable tour guide to your friends or spouse, as long as they didn't actually see the back of your camera... --- Bob
It might be useful For stock photography galleries and the like. And news bureaus. At least one of the recent Reuters "fauxtography" scandal photos wasn't taken where it was claimed to have been.
Well, I dunno if that is exactly true. I'd heard of the EXIF tag (thanks for reminding me of what it was), and on this post this person went in to examine the contents...and whatever application they were using...was adding full name and other info they'd used to register the photo application they were using.
This is what caught my attention. Kind of like how MS imbeds information into word .doc files...I was amazed when I ran some old documents through strings..and saw all the metadata it was keeping. It had email history of where the doc was sent..etc. Stuff that does not belong on a document.
My fear is what all can be stored in the image metadata...before I wanted to go posting anything like that in public, I'd sure want to check and 'clean' it a bit if necessary.
I do check word docs before they go out....and now that I know about EXIF, I'll check that too.
I wonder if the Feds have any 'watermarks' in these cameras yet...similar to how color laser printers have markings the Feds insisted on, to aid in tracking counterfeiting?
[steps off soapbox, and re-adjusts tin foil hat]
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
This is close - it captures location, time, and direction. Now all it needs is angle (azimuth). From the product description: "...tilting can stop the GPS receiver and compas from working properly..." Ok, fix this glitch and add azimuth info. Next, make it small enough to fit into a point-and-shoot. To all those privacy freaks - just don't record the information about the shot. You can also eliminate any EXIF data on your pics if you want. As for me - I find it extremely useful to know where I took a shot and when. Taking site photos of projects would be so much easier if I could just say "this is the x block of such and such, looking north at the property" without haveing to take written notes after I take each shot. Ok, so my example does not include azimuth information. Just like I have a need for time, location and direction, I am sure someone has a need for azimuth information.
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Well said.
The other major purpose of this is for historical benefit. Imagine, for example, that we had Geotagging+Timestamping on all the photos taken in the last 30 years, and they were shared on something like Flickr. You could focus on a particular place and build a timeline of photos to see how it changes over the years. Given the ubiquity of camera phones, digital cameras, etc, we could have a complete photo-historical record of, well, almost everything.
Personally, I've gone through all my "good" photos recently (over 500 of em) and geotagged them by hand with Picasa and Google Earth (and now I'm in the middle of the laborious task of replacing them all on Flickr) for no other reason than I think it's neat - I like being able to display them out on a map to show people. I think it's a much more interesting way of visualizing them than the standard coffee table photo album.
That and I can't tell you how many times I've gone through my Grandparent's photo albums and the conversation went something like this:
"Wow, when was this taken?"
"Don't remember exactly. Sometime in the 60's."
"Where was this?"
"Arizona, I think. Or maybe it was when we went to California."
"Who is this?"
"Don't remember. Frank? Is that Frank? I think it's Frank."
So yeah, I think metadata is a good thing.
is that Sony's rootkit will prevent your camera from taking photos where those famous Ansel Adams pictures were taken in order to avoid copyright infringement and that the battery may catch on fire if you try to disconnect the device from your camera while "on location."
It is actually good to know where all the idiots are. We have to protect them against themselves.
:-))).
Additionally, because it is a well known fact that politicians are mostly technological idiots, I wonder when we will first be able to dismantle a conspiracy
Your link would have been a brilliant post, if it was in fact where the main story itself linked to. You might want to chck that out before making biting sarcastic commentary. Now you just look like a huge dorfus.
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Well, I'm wondering about that right now. I sell images online [gdargaud.net] and I'm in the process of editing two new CD compilations. The difference with before is that I now use digital which records the instant the image was taken. I'm not absolutely sure I want people to know exactly where I was every day of my life (or every day I use a camera). It's one thing to have your images made public, another one to have your whereabouts made public, although I can't really pinpoint a negative example.
If you're not comfortable with that sort of information going wherever you don't want it to go, there are a number of ways to go about stripping that info from whatever images you distribute. The one exception is that you're probably not going to strip it out of your RAW images, but then you probably don't distribute those, and you just wouldn't want to do that anyway. All that delicious information is only a google away.
I'd think most semi-serious digital photographers would realize that EXIFs are both there (the're very useful) and can be removed. If you're doing this as a semi-pro, file this in the TMYK bin.
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I thought GPS's were to be embeded into mobile phones for security reasons in the USofA. from there is would be and easy task to have some software to metadata the GPS info into any photos that the camera takes. Then MMS/GPRS the photos you wish to share to where ever.
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I see this making cyber stalking easier. Look at it this way. You find your new girlfriend on the geophoto site, you see that she uploads pictures every saturday from a park or event, and then you just go there.
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...millions of boring, uninsightful images....
That's happening anyway. As far as a spec goes, EXIF data fields include GPS fields. Most citizens wouldn't have much use for it, many field scientists, military, etc. Could use such info readily. I participated in a failed effort to document views from Native American sacred sites that could have been extremely interesting, but the photographer got lost in his art and provided us with 100s of images - some very nice - and minimal viewshed information scribbled in pencil on note paper. He was completely baffled when we withheld part of the fee because he had not properly filled his contract. We had to explain in tiny words, many times that his pictures were nice, but his data stank, and he had completely forgotten to monument his stands so they could be GPSd.
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LOL
- 149.851316&ie=UTF8&z=17&ll=61.264312,-149.851316&s pn=0.002362,0.01354&t=h&om=1&iwloc=A
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=61.26426,
I have reviewed the Sony GPS-CS1, and I also have an extensive webpage on geocoding photos using GPS or manually.
How many people have a camera with a flash hotshoe ? Most cameras have integrated flash & no shoe, unless your aiming for the professional market, but you've just missed out on a large number of consumers with digital compacts.
No, really !
I've been able to do this on my cell phone (integrated) here in Japan for years. Every picture I take has it's GPS coordinates embeded into it, and I can make a comment on the picture as well. Old news. Wayyyyyyy old news. http://www.psphacks.net/
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I don't think any GPS receivers record or store that. Until I started looking, I wasn't even sure how you would measure something like that, without moving mechanical parts. There are magnetic compass sensors and solid-state MEMS accelerometers, but none of them do the trick.
I did some Googling and it would seem that there are things called "tilt sensors" or "electrolytic inclinometers" that would probably do the trick if you were wanting to. They use fluid-filled capsules, almost like a mercury switch but with more resolution. (More info here.) I've certainly never heard of a GPS instrument with them built in, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
The only applications I can think of where you'd want to combine something like that with a GPS would be in aircraft navigation, or perhaps some very special remote-control/robotics systems (*cough* cruise missiles *cough*). Nothing that you're going to find for a few hundred bucks at WalMart, I'd guess.
But as the idea of geotagging photos becomes more mainstream, I think we can plan on seeing a lot more interesting hardware applications of GPS. After all, the camera manufacturers need to find some way to get folks to upgrade -- once everybody has a 4 or 6MP camera, the upgrade cycle that's been driving the market for the last few years (more pixels) is effectively over. The difference between a 6MP and an 8MP camera, or between 8 and 10, is small to the layman who doesn't do more than the very slight cropping to his photos -- and even more irrelevant if it doesn't come with prohibitively expensive optics.
It's electronics and integration -- cellular integration, WiFi, GPS -- that are going to be big features in the next round of cameras; that's if convergence devices don't kill them off first (I don't think they will, but we'll see).
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