This is a real benefit and means I can now maintain a single library on the network and a backup on a removable drive. Not sure as yet what the performance will be like and it may be that it is not really practical to use a shared network drive for this ( on 100Mb network anyway ). I will have a go and report back on my findings later, meanwhile if you had already spotted this and have tried it out I would be interested to hear how you got on.

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.

One way of accurately selecting the endpoint of the current clip is to use the cursor keys to move the end of the highlighted section instead of dragging around the mouse. Basically all you need to do is to roughly grab the clip that you are looking for then put down the mouse and simply press and hold the SHIFT key while you move the clip forward and backward by pressing the left and right cursor keys. The selection will extend or contract by one frame for each press of the cursor keys.

If anyone knows how to use the same trick to accurately position the start of the clip I would love to know.

[tags]imovie, ilife, tips[/tags]

Worth watching this one.

[tags]ilife, imovie[/tags]