Two of my hobbies are geocaching and photography. They go well together in the sense that there’s good photo oportunities when out geocaching. Many caches are placed in noteworthy locations worth the trip alone. If you’re curious about geocaching a good starting point is geocaching.com, have a look at the introductory article. Alternatively there’s a few videos on youtube if you prefer that.
A side effect of carrying a gps on these trips is that you will have a tracklog of your path – timestamped coordinates recorded by the gps (most models) that can be downloaded to the local pc. These timestamped tracks can be combined with the timestamps on your digital images to form “geotagged” images. This is called “Exif stamping” as the longtitude and lattitude is written to the embedded Exif fields. There’s also the option to manually tag the images with coordinates if you don’t have a gps.
These images can now be shown in different map contexts such as Google earth, Google maps etc. You could also upload to online services such as flickr.
The exif stamping is a simple task in itself – read data from gps log and write to jpg field, but as there might be time offsets between your images you might need to tweak this. When I started some time ago I research and found a few tools:
WWMX Location Stamper (free, beta)
JetPhoto (commercial, trial available)
RoboGeo (commercial, trial available)
Out of these three my choice was to go for RoboGeo – it has an easy to use interface and good options for making correcting as well as manually geotagging using integration with Google Earth. It also have a good range of options on both the import and export side. WWMX does the basic geotagging if that is what you need. JetPhoto has a very nice interface, and is also a photo album manager – but less fleixbe on the import/exports. For me the choice was RoboGeo. As I’m a not a Mac user I did not look into Mac software – there is a solution for iPhoto described in this Ogle Earth blog entry. If you have opinions of these products or suggestions of other tools leave a comment and I may make a more detailed review at a later stage.
A side note – if you have a Nokia Series 60 cameraphone then ZoneTag is worth checking out. This research prototype lets you upload captured and automatically geotagged images directly to flickr. It will also add suggested tags based on the location and other users that have shot the same area. Cool.
To finish this post I’ll leave you with an example of how the end result can look. This is the former mentioned visit to Bray where Anna and I climbed Bray Head. This is a google map export from RoboGeo.
Holy shit Oy! This is a new one for me. I have never heard of this geocaching before. Just had a quick read of its origins and it sounds really cool! Two questions though, 1: Is it an expensive hobby? Technology wise. 2: How technically minded do you need to be. I have no experience or knowledge about GPS.
Hi Dave – my geocaching talk must have escaped you last weekend
1) There’s som initial investment – You would some sort of a GPS unit, they come in different price classes – ranging from £69 for the basic Garmin eTrex at Amazon.co.uk
I’d recomend you to go for a handheld trekking gps (as opposed to car nav systems) that have room for a good amount of waypoints (to store a set of geocaches when heading out).
Myself I have the Garmin eTrex Legend C that is now discontinued for the Cx model that has a removable memory card. I’m very happy with that.
Other options are to get a bluetooth GPS receiver to use with you mobile phone (check if software is available first), or get a PDA with GPS built in. GPS is probably going mainstream as an integrated part of handhelds within the next 5 years or so.
A handheld GPS is also great when visiting cities – you can use it to navigate to the closes recomended pub/ restaurant for instance. And when hiking of course.
2) Geocaching itself isnt technical really – its quite easy to use the GPS and mark off the location of the cache you seek. More advanced things like geotagging and uploading geocache waypoints to the GPS may need some fiddling but isnt hard. Let me know if you need help