How To Geotag Your Photos Ready For iPhoto 09

The recently announced update to iLife includes a number of really desirable new features, not least of which is the iPhoto function called Places. If you missed the KeyNote you can see a demo of Places at http://www.apple.com/ilife but basically it is a very cool way of browsing your photo library using Google Maps. Of course this is dependant on iPhoto knowing where you were when each photo was taken. This won’t be an issue for iPhone users as photos taken on Apples phone are automatically tagged with the location courtesy of the built in GPS receiver. A number of other mobile phones will also do this as well as a small number of consumer digital cameras, however if your camera is not state of the art you are left with the task of manually tagging photos to get the benefit of this new feature. This might not be to hard for the odd photo, but if you are about to embark on a trip and intend to take many hundreds of photos then it could be quite a major undertaking when you return home.

Well there may be an answer for you which if you already have a phone with a built in GPS such as a Blackberry in the shape of two applications, the first being a free GPS Tracker for Blackberry and a small number of Nokia handsets called bbTracker and the second a free OS X application called GPSPhotoLinker.

bbTracker uses the built in GPS in Blackberrys to track your location and save to memory on the phone. This can then be exported to GPX or KML files for import into other applications including GPSPhotoLinker.

GPSPhotoLinker uses the imported track data from your GPS tracker ( or bbTracker ) and matches the date and time to a set of photos to identify where you were when the picture was taken. It then updates the EXIF data of the photo to include not just the longitude and latitude but also the city, state and country.

To use these two applications to geotag your photos you will firstly need to make sure the date and time on your phone/Blackberry/GPS Tracker are synchronised as GPSPhotoLinker will use this information to locate your position at the time the photo was taken. Before beginning to take any photos make sure bbTracker is started and is tracking your location ( alternatively switch on and start your GPS Tracker ). At the end of the photo session stop bbTracker and save the Track, later when you get home you will need to export this to a GPX file and transfer to your Mac. I did this by enabling Bluetooth sharing on my Mac and then sent the GPX file from the Blackberry by Bluetooth.

Connect up your camera to your Mac but don’t allow iPhoto to import directly as GPSPhotoLinker cannot link to photos in your iPhoto library. Instead copy photos to a temporary location on your Mac. Fire up GPSPhotoLinker and load the GPX track file you previously transferred to the Mac and also load in the batch of photos you wish to geotag. GPSPhotoLinker will then process the whole batch in one go ( if required photos can be matched manually but this defeats the point of this tutorial ) and will identify the location of each photo by comparing date and time to the GPX track file.

Once completed you can either Import the photos into iPhoto or just drag and drop them into iPhoto directly. There you have it, geotagged photos. You can confirm that the GPS data is there by right clicking a photo and selecting Get Info, you should see all the location data there and are all ready for iPhoto 09 !

All the best and please let me know if this article was of any help to you.