MAKE: Blog: HOW TO GPS Tag Photos: Flickr, Mappr, Google Earth....

Here's the simple, non-techy way of tagging photos with the location of where you took them on planet Earth. There are lots of ways to do this, and I'll write about those later- but this is fun thing to do over the holiday weekend. As an added bonus, I'll show you how to see your photos on a cool Mapping application called Mappr, as well as Google Earth...

After hanging out at Where 2.0, I've been more interested in tagging my photographs with where they were taken with the exact latitude and longitude so I can later do some interesting things with them. This how-to is just the start of some mapping hacks, step-by-steps etc- I wanted to start out with the simplest method possible so even the non-techies can play. Also, if you have suggestions or other ways of doing this, please add them in the comments!

For this how-to all you'll need is:


A digital camera.
A free Flickr account.
Optional: Cheap GPS off Ebay or wherever.
Planning the photos
The first thing you'll want to do figure out what types of photos make sense to tag with their location. For now, I'm just testing out stuff so it doesn't matter- but my plan is to get/take photos of MAKE projects around the USA (and beyond). Imagine spinning a globe and zooming in and out of cool projects and MAKErs from around the world. Any way, my photo test today was at Gas Works park in Seattle, WA.



Taking the photos
I happen to have a cheap GPS I got off Ebay, so as I took photos around the park, I also took a photo of the position I was at. Eventually, we'll see cameras that have GPS built in (there are some attachments and cameras now) but this is a low-tech way, take the photo, take a photo of the GPS with the latitude and longitude.



Wikipedia- Latitude is an angular measurement ranging from 0° at the Equator to 90° at the poles. Longitude is given as an angular measurement ranging from 0° at the Prime Meridian to +180° eastward and −180° westward.










You may need to convert the GPS coordinates. Here's a handy web site that can help you.

If you don't have a GPS, that's OK too. But, you'll need to write down or use another method to record where you're at. A simple hack (if you're taking photos near streets) is to look at the spot you're at, jot down the address and look it up later. Here's what I do...

Getting the Lat and Long via Google Maps
Let's say you take a photo at the top of the Space Needle in Seattle, WA. You can later pop on over to http://maps.google.com/ and enter "Space Needle, Seattle, WA" and zoom in / out and find the exact location. Once you find the location, click the "link to this page" link in the upper right. The URL will now appear in your browser, cut and paste it in to notepad or some text application.



http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=47.620314,-122.348996&spn=0.005636,0.011996&t=k&hl=en

In the URL there are two bits of information we'll need. The ll is lat and long:

Lat: 47.620314
Lon: -122.348996



Advanced: If you use Firefox, you can do this more "automagically"- Geotagging Flickr photos, with GoogleMaps via a cool Greasemonkey script and bookmarklet. More here.

Uploading the photos to Flickr
Flickr is pretty much, hands down, the coolest and best way to post photos online- It's my favorite "application" of all time, each week there's something new to do with it. If you haven't already, grab a free account. Once you're up and running you can upload you photos via the web, or add on applications. How you upload doesn't matter, it's all about the tagging.

Tagging the Photos
Once your photos are on Flickr, you can individually edit the tags or all once. For my example, I kept the photos of the GPS (the location of the photos taken) on my hard drive, and just uploaded the photos I took of the actual places. For each photo, I've tagged where they were taken with the lat and lon, if you need to look up the addresses via Google you can do that now, or read them off your GPS photos like I did.

I've added some other tags that have been useful for other projects, the folks at geobloggers.com have a lot of interesting things going on, so if you take your photos with geotagged, you'll also be able to participate in other projects- but if you don't want to, there's no need. Here's an example of some tags...

make
seattle
google earth
geotagged
geo:lat=47.620628
geo:long=-122.349329





It's also a good idea to put http://www.geobloggers.com/ in the photo description. Here's why (for the techies)...in the description add a link to www.geobloggers.com (i.e. (geotagged). From the photos own page (not the photo stream) click the link. geobloggers will automagically look up the photo you just came from and search the tags for the lat and long. Note: If the link doesn't seem to work wait a couple of minutes and try again. Sometimes it takes a short while for the lon/lat tags to appear in the XML data I get back from the flickr API. More here.

Looking at the Photos on the Map (with Mappr)
Now that I've tagged my photos with MAKE and the location of where they're at, I'm pretty much done! If you go to http://www.mappr.com you can just enter in the tag (MAKE) and see all the photos that have been tagged MAKE and also have lat and long. You could just put in your user name.

Here are what some of it looks like...(they're getting hammered with traffic at the moment, so you might need to try the site at different times).






Viewing the photos with Google Earth
If you want to see your photos in Google Earth (free 3D application from Google). You can do it in a few ways, the simpliest way that I've found is to download this KML (Google Earth file) that will look for photos wherever you're zoomed in to and stopped moving. Right click this link, save it, and once you install Google Earth double click it.



Adding a "Network Link" allows you to fetch KML data from remote servers. It does this in two ways, Time Based or Location Based. So *anyone* can add dynamic data to Google Maps. More about this here...Also check out GeoBlogger's with all their amazing hacks.

Right click / control click and save this file and double click it, it will add my photos to Google Earth, so you can see what I am up to!











If you select "Flickr" in the places, ad press play you'll get an amazing photo tour of geobloggers in your area!

And that's it for now...feel free to post your links, photos, suggestions and questions in the comments. I'm hoping that lots of people will try this out, even if they're not hardcore alpha geeks, and later build on their experiments and try out the web services. We're about to see an explotion of mapping related services, nothing "new" has happened, just the data is finally "free" and hackers, remixers, tinkerers and Makers are playing. Enjoy!


A little bonus note-- I really like Google Earth, more so since it's based on the following- "Digital Earth" excerpts from Snow Crash, © 1992 by Neal Stephenson:
There is something new: a globe about the size of grapefruit, a perfectly detailed rendition of Planet Earth, hanging in space at arm's length in front of his eyes... It's a piece of CIC software called, simply, Earth. It is the user interface that the CIC uses to keep track of every bit of spatial information that it owns -- all the maps, weather data, architectural plans, and satellite surveillance stuff.

The level of detail is fantastic. The resolution, the clarity, just the look of it...

It's not just the continents and oceans. It looks exactly like the Earth would look from a point in geosynchronous orbit directly above L.A., complete with weather systems -- vast spinning galaxies of clouds, hovering just above the surface of the oceans -- and polar ice caps, fading and fragmenting into the sea. Half of the globe is illuminated by sunlight, and half is dark. The terminator -- the line between night and day -- has just swept across L.A. and is now creeping across the Pacific, off to the west.

Link.


Posted by Phillip Torrone | 11:49 AM
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Comments
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Check out this web app and tutorial I've just written that allows you to geotag Flickr photos from within the Google Earth interface. It makes the process above much easier for people without a GPS.

Geotagging Flickr photos with Google Earth

Posted by: zeman on January 03, 2006 at 01:03 PM

I wrote an app in .NET that makes this process a bit easier.
Basically you drag and drop the KML files onto the photos and it automatically adds the IPTC data (which flickr can read)

check it out
http://www.itagsoftware.awswa.com/

Posted by: Bugmenot on November 17, 2005 at 01:05 AM

You should check out "ike" at www.survey-lab.com. This device can do it all with one click and drop it into Google or any other GIS software. Commercial rugged and priced to match though. Device stores own location and location of object in picture plus direction camera was pointing so the photo can be viewed from the same perspective it was taken from.

Posted by: Slab on August 31, 2005 at 12:39 AM

Phillip, excellent article, I wondered if you've taken a look at Tagzania yet? Using a combination of Google Earth and Tagzania I've created another HOWTO: Geotag anything. Just wanted to say thanks for the inspiration!

Posted by: Grasshoppermind on August 22, 2005 at 01:45 PM

Great thinks about geotaging. But this is still not the real thing. Sorry about my nglish, but i´m from germany. Here is my idea:

All the geotags in combination with photos are 2D. You always stick the photo flat on map or the sat picture of google earth or whatever software you are using. In google earth there is the function that you can shift the map or sat picture, so you could fly over the ground in a kind of 3D. Wouldn´t it be nice to place the photos stand up so exact in the 3D inviroment so that you see through see the building or mountain that you once made a picture of.

Posted by: johoho on July 30, 2005 at 02:00 AM

Another excellent way to tag your photo's on Flickr is Plazes. It uses the fingerprint of a network you're on to create a global map of locations, called plazes. You can register networks, provide some geodata, and when you're online it'll check to see where you are, it also shows other plazes in your vicinity, as well as other people online. You can use Plazes to aut-tag photo's with the geodata for a registered plaze, which makes the whole endeavour really simple. Give it a try.

Posted by: Kaeru on July 08, 2005 at 02:26 AM

GreaseMonkey is great, I think it's the killer app for Firefox. I was going to post a link to that script but Claveran beat me to it.

Posted by: BruceR on July 07, 2005 at 07:13 AM

Another easy way to geotag photos is by syncing a GPS tracklog with timestamps in the photos, then inserting coordinates in the EXIF headers. WWMX Location Stamper is free and accomplishes this easily.



mapufacture.com (and maybe mappr & geobloggers, not sure) will read EXIF locations, and geotags. Just specify the url of a flickr photo stream in the "Annotate with RSS" box.

Posted by: mikel_maron on July 04, 2005 at 05:48 AM

You should try geocaching www.geocaching.com I think you'd like it.


Posted by: isolino60 on July 04, 2005 at 05:43 AM

There's a new integration of flickr and google maps that can simplify the process of locating position in Google Maps, tagging photos and posting to Geobloggers. A map is embedded into flickr for users to see where the photos were taken without leaving flickr.

A screenshot is here http://www.flickr.com/photos/ckyuan/23187093/,
and some discussions in the geotagging flickr group are here http://www.flickr.com/groups/topic/49720/ .

Posted by: Claveran on July 03, 2005 at 08:18 PM

double click the spot.

Posted by: philliptorrone on July 03, 2005 at 03:58 PM

Wow! This is awesome. I tried using Google Maps to find the lat/long of some photos where I knew exactly where I had been when I took them. However, after zooming in on the exact point and centering it, the "link to this page" link still only goes to the place I last searched for. Any tips?

Posted by: dalangalma on July 03, 2005 at 01:21 PM

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Here's what others have to say about HOW TO GPS Tag Photos: Flickr, Mappr, Google Earth....:

» Tagging Photos With GPS Coordinates...The Easy Way from EverythingDigital.org
I always thought it was hopeless to even try attaching lat/lon coordinates to photos without a proper digital camera gps attachment, but thankfully Phillip Torrone of Make: Magazine has proved me wrong and successfully used Google Maps to do the... [Read More]
Tracked on July 03, 2005 at 09:34 PM

» Google Toolbar: Google Going After Microsoft And Apple from Google News Blog
But I do see Google moving rapidly, if somewhat haphazardly, beyond its core business of Internet search in ways that put the Mountain View company on a collision course with other tech giants -- specifically Apple and Microsoft. It's my job as a colu... [Read More]
Tracked on January 25, 2006 at 06:19 AM



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