I’ve been interested in Geotagging for quite some time now. I won’t say that I tag everything, but I’m horrible at adding tags and sorting my photos and it sure is nice to have just one more way to find that one image I am looking for or perhaps refresh my feeble mind as to the location of the image. I wrote some time ago about my Geotagging workflow using the wonderful HoudahGeo application. HoudahGeo is a great app that will take a bunch of images from a folder, mate them up with Google Maps or a tracklog from a GPS device and write the location data to the EXIF. Pretty straight forward and simple. One problem. I’m lazy.
I wanted an application that could tag my images right inside of Aperture. I like to import my images directly from my CF cards into Aperture and the HoudahGeo workflow required an intermediate copy and tag process before ever getting into Aperture. Heaven forbid I might want to tag after the fact. In which case I would have to drill down into the Aperture Library package and find the desired image and load that file into HoudahGeo. If I wanted to do a bunch of images it was even harder, since Aperture encases every master file in its own folder with its metadata. No easy processing of a group of images since I had to open every folder and drag in each desired image on its own.
Some time ago, an application called Maperture from Übermind Software popped up, promising to allow Geotagging of images inside the Aperture application. Hallelujah! I cried, no more intermediate steps.
I was not so delighted upon trying it. I suppose maybe I’m too sophisticated, but it seems that many location tagging applications presume that you want to look at an image, remember where you took it, and use Google Maps or Google Earth to pin it to the map. Whoaaa there buddy! That’s way too much work. The entire reason I want geotagging is that I can never remember where I’ve been in the first place! I want either my camera to do the work for me (more on that in another post) or I want to let some little cool gadget keep track of where I’ve been and then I want it to tell my computer where I was at the time of any given image. It sounds simple. It took a little to get there, however.
Shortly after I discovered Maperture, I sadly realized that it never really addressed the whole tracklog issue. It did really nothing more than Apple was able to achieve in its later update to iPhoto: if you were lucky enough to own one of the few cameras with GPS built in (or have an integrated device on your camera – but that’s another post) then the application will pin it on the map. Otherwise, do it yourself.
I own a little GPS dongle from AMOD that is as simple as it gets. I’ve written about it before, but very simply you turn it on, it acquires data, you turn it off. Plug it into USB and you can copy the data off in a standardized text file. Easy Peasy – or so you would think.
When I met with my initial disappointment over the early version of Maperture, I contacted Übermind about the inclusion of tracklogs in future versions. Some time thereafter, I was fortunate to be invited to participate in Übermind’s beta program on their Pro product which was slated to support tracklogs.
It took a while, and some discussion of workflow ensued over the course of several months. I’m not taking credit for any ideas, but I’m very happy to see the operation of the Aperture plugin with regards to tracklogs exactly as I had hoped it would be.
The key to making a tracklog created by an external GPS device work with images made in a digital camera is that the time reference of both the camera and the GPS device must be synchronous. It sounds simple, but when you consider that you usually enter the time into your DSLR with the press of a few buttons on the back of the camera while looking at the clock on the wall and the GPS device gets its time from the satellite, its not so trivial anymore. Some devices have a display that shows the time, so you can set your camera from that (or take a picture of the time and compare to find the difference). But many devices, like mine, have no such display. Maybe it also seems trivial that you can be “close enough” and that may be just fine in some cases. But consider the scenario of taking pictures from a moving car at 60mph. A difference of just a minute between the GPS and camera results in a mile offset in your GPS data! Nevermind that picture of the grand canyon taken from the helicopter ride or the shot out the cabin window of the airplane. I, for one, want more accuracy than that.
I discussed this at long lengths with the beta contact at Übermind. And, whether they got it from me or got it from someone else, they definitely got it!
My workflow starts when I turn on the GPS. My AMOD device takes about 30 seconds or less to acquire a satellite signal. It tells me it has achieved triangulation nirvana by flashing the green satellite shaped LED on the face of the device. I simply turn on the AMOD, wait for the green light to flash and snap a picture of the device. It doesn’t even have to be in focus. Now I have a reference point. I know that the first entry in the tracklog file must coincide with the picture of the device itself – at least within my reaction time. And now I can calculate the offset between my camera and the GPS device. Think about it. It makes sense.
So let me show you how Maperture Pro works in my workflow. Once I know my reference image is accounted for, and my GPS is running, I shoot away. Last weekend I shot almost a thousand images at an airshow. The AMOD GPS just ticked away, clipped to my camera bag as I walked around the show snapping images. When I returned home I mounted the GPS device via USB (different devices may require different methods to get the data off) and pulled the tracklog file (in my case the AMOD writes a standard NMEA 0813 format file). Then I loaded all my images from my CF cards into an Aperture project (not an insignificant amount of time, mind you) and I was ready to go.
Maperture Pro works just like any other plug in. Simply select the images you want to process – in this case I selected all 970 images – INCLUDING the first one of the GPS device itself – and selected Maperture Pro from the “Edit with…” menu.
Maperture Pro opens the images into its interface and shows you the selected images across the top.
At this point it’s easy enough to select an image and pin it manually on the map. But I don’t want to do that. I have 970-some images to tag and I have a record of where I’ve been when. From the gear menu on the right, I select “Import tracklog…” and go select my tracklog file.
The AMOD device uses a naming convention that lets me easily find the right file by date and Import it into Maperture Pro.
Then you wait….and wait…and watch the beach ball…and wait again.
Honestly, Maperture does a pretty good job of parsing the file, but you do have to be a little patient. Tracklog files like this are huge (I have my device writing a new data point every 5 seconds – this one was over 16 thousand points!) and being patient is expected. It took 2-3 minutes before I could proceed.
Now the brilliant feature that a lot of applications don’t consider. Maperture Pro tells me what I’m working with and preps me for what to do next. After the tracklog is processed, Maperture Pro displays some very important data.
It tells me what time my first and last tracklog datapoint is and what time my first and last image is. Remember that blurry image I took at the beginning of the day? THAT is my first image, and my tracklog tells me what time that image SHOULD have on it. Simple math does the rest. In this case, I see that I must add 13 seconds to my image time for it to match the tracklog time. Simple enough. Enter it into the Time Offset field and you’re ready to go (this could also be useful if you’ve not changed your camera to Daylight Savings Time, or you’ve switched time zones and not accounted for it, etc.). This dialogue also lets you set your options for how to interpolate between tracklog data points or skip data points. Useful, but not as useful to me as the offset time.
Clicking “Match Images” starts the process of finding the location of each image. Locations that have been tagged show up as pins on the map and images are badged in the image display (images that already contain location data also bear this badge when the plugin opens). Again, a little patience is a virtue, especially if you are processing a lot of images, but the wait is certainly reasonable considering the alternative.
Finally, “Set Locations from Tracklog” writes the location data to the EXIF and returns to Aperture.
I can’t say enough about this plugin. I was so frustrated with my previous workflow – as good as HoudahGeo was – that I purchased a hardware GPS device for my Nikon D300 to tag as I go. It’s great and I thought that I’d never use the AMOD GPS again, but Maperture Pro has changed my mind and now I’m glad I have both. I’ll talk more about that device in a future post. but for now, if you have tracklogs you want to process in Aperture, Maperture Pro is it.
It’s that simple.
