Chris Casciano’s Place Name Here

A while back I posted instructions on geotagging photos with any GPS capable cell phone or device. Prompted by a question from one of my students (oh hey, I should talk about my new gig sometime!) and the fact the post is one of the more popular around here I thought the post deserved revisiting.

Since 2008 I’ve updated my camera body, gotten an iPhone, and streamlined both the number of devices I carry and the workflow for getting geographic data into my photos. Still, the premise of the old post hasn’t changed — you can encode any photo you take from any digital camera you have by syncing the photos timestamp with your saved GPS information.

Here’s how I’m currently tagging photos from my Nikon D90 with information saved on my iPhone using the RunKeeper Pro app.

Commercial photographer and serial iPhone camera user Chase Jarvis has recently popularized the idea that “the best camera is the one that is with you” in a big way. Armed with a camera small enough that you’re willing to carry it everywhere you become free to capture moments, record mental notes, and other save images that would have otherwise passed you by. Though his weapon of choice is a cell phone camera my weapon has recently been an artifact of a decade ago picked up off of eBay — the Casio WQV-1 wrist watch camera. Though it only takes postage sized [120×120 pixels] black and white images it does so in a way that satisfies my bestcam needs.

Digital video and digital photograph formats are so close, and yet so far away.

On many cameras like the Nikon D90 I use, the difference between capturing one or the other is a switch or a button away, and destinations for the content like Flickr do little to distinguish the two formats. However, when you get the memory card back to the computer what you do with them and how you process the captured files is worlds apart. I don’t have a handy solution to process images and video in the same way, but here’s one way to help the management of the files by using a still reference photograph as a hook for the metadata though our workflow from acquisition right through publishing onto web sites.