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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.

After reading Moose Peterson’s blog post on the Nikon GP-1 GPS Device I need to correct a bit of misinformation from my earlier post Nikon D80 To D90 Upgrade First Impressions.

There I lamented the fact that you could only plug in the Nikon MC-DC2 remote cord, or the GPS unit, but in fact the GPS unit has a remote plug in is so you can daisy chain the two devices. Also in the blog post, Moose mentions the GP-1 includes a clip to attach it to your camera strap instead of the hot shoe leaving the hot shoe free for flash usage.

Though I’ll continue using my off camera geologger for now, with these two options the GP-1 design looks much better and it will be an alternative I’ll consider should the time come that I want to change up my system.

Update 2/1/2010: I’ve written a new post about my current workflow for geotagging photos based on information from my iPhone

While some cameras and camera phones have the ability to geotag digital photos as they’re taken, most still don’t. However you can still geotag your photographs accurately and automatically with the use of an external GPS enabled device like a cell phone, navigation device, or a dedicated GPS logger. Any device that can record a “GPS track” that can be transfered to your computer can be used to tag photos. And photos taken with any digital camera can be tagged in this manner.

Here I’ll explain how I use GPSPhotoLinker on OS X to batch tag many photos from a day’s photo shoot with GPS tracks recorded on either a Sony GPS-CS1 or a Nokia N95 cell phone in order to create mapped photo galleries, like this one on Flickr.