Google Maps Mania: Build your own Google Photo Map with a GPS-equipped camera

location based services

= Easy Photo Mapping

Tim Vidas has a great description of how he was able to equip his Ricoh D200 with a GPS unit to easily Google Map pictures he takes with it. He explains that "The tagging of GPS data into the Exif of each picture is a really nice novelty for me". More from his How-To:

The Sales folks as Red Hen informated me that the adapter would come with some sort of mapping software, and when it didn't I called them up and was informed that it's 'not quite ready' and they'd email be about beta testing (evidently the sales teams information didn't quite jive with the software team). So I set out to create my own, and as it turns out, with only a Image::ExifTool, the Google Maps API and a little over a hundred lines of PERL, I have a script that given a directory of images, will create the GMaps htm, the associated XML for the GPS points and extract thumbnails from the pictures themselves. All that's left is to upload everything to a web directory! [Read More..]

On his page he has posted the source code for you to be able to do this yourself, and even makes his custom map pins available to anyone that wants to use them!

A possible way to take this a step further would be to somehow tie this into a PocketPC with a mobile data plan on it that would allow you to wirelessly transfer these photos the second they are taken to a server that automatically Google-maps them with this app running. This way you could snap photos and have them instantly viewable for people looking at your real-time Google Photo-Map. It will only be a matter of time before this is possible. Camera companies like Ricoh or Canon could do this in partnership with mobile carriers, or perhaps mobile phone handset manufacturers could just add the GPS feature to picture phones and mobile carriers could just build a service offering around it? Fun stuff. I can't wait for this all to be a little easier to do.

[Via Digg]

posted by Morpeth @ 3:19 PM 1 comments links to this post

1 Comments:
At 9:32 PM, Greg said...
You don't even need a GPS-enabled camera. If you have a GPS and a digital camera, that's all you need. A group at Microsoft Research has a free program that will do what you need. Go here:
http://wwmx.org/Download.aspx
and get the WWMX Location Stamper utility. That program reads in your photos and the saved track log from your GPS, and inserts the geotag information into your photos. Basically it says, "Your photo says it was taken at 3:18, and your track log says that at 3:18, you were standing at _____". It does the cross reference, and inserts the data invisibly into your photos just as if they had been taken with a GPS-enabled camera. Very cool. I wish I'd thought of that years ago. I've got tons of vacation photos or hiking photos that I now can't remember where they were taken.


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