Thunder

Taken from Google Earths Sightseer newsletter (sign up here):

Picasa is free software from Google for finding, organizing, editing and sharing photos on your PC. Now, starting with version 2.5, Picasa allows you to use Google Earth to quickly locate (or geotag) the place your photos were taken. You can then create a map in Google Earth to share your photos with your friends. The process is really simple. Once you have your photos in Picasa, simply select a group of photos you want to locate. Then choose the “Tools -> Geotag with Google Earth” option. Google Earth will open and a small window with thumbnails of your photos appears. Find the location where the photo was taken in Google Earth using search, or by moving to it with your mouse. Zoom in as close as you need to identify the location. Finally, select the”Geotag” button. You can also select a group of photos taken at the same location and choose the “Geotag All” option. The location information is stored in a standardized fashion in the photo file itself.

You can then use Picasa to generate a Google Earth file with snapshots of your photo as a map by choosing “Tools->Geotag->Export to Google Earth”. If you choose “Tools->Geotag->View in Google Earth” and your geotagged photos will automatically appear when you look at their respective locations.

View the latest issue here.

It looks like Sony are going to launch a camera and GPS receiver unit for the PSP at the Tokyo Game Show starting on September 22nd.  It will be interesting to see the cost of these units and then to try and have a go at using them for geotagging.

Thanks to a new bookmarklet from Sumaato the geotagging of your flickr photos just became a lot easier.

First things first, if you don’t know what I mean by geotagging check my earlier posting.

After you have figured out what goetagging is and you have your photos uploaded to flickr then visit http://labs.sumaato.net/tools/flickr_geocode_bookmarklet/ and drag the bookmarklet onto your browsers toolbar.

The next step is to view the photo in flickr that you wish to geotag, once loaded click on the bookmarklet.  A google map appears alongside your photo, navigate and zoom into the place the photo was taken, once you have pinpointed the location click on the correct part of the map and then select SAVE LOCATION.

The bookmarklet now automatically tags your photo with the lon & lat co-ords as well as adding a link to the location in google maps within the photo description.

Give it a go and let me know what you think.

Last night I had one of those ‘wow! that’s cool’ moments.

A couple of weeks ago Shropshire CC allowed access to Flickr from our schools so I decided it was time to upgrade my free account to a Pro account. It was time to see what else I can do with my photos, and I had been discussing with Ewan about setting up a project to geotag and share some photos of Roman relics etc in Shropshire for Scottish schools to have access to.

I searched around Flickr and via a geotagging group I came across FlickrFly (FlickrFly is a script that can be linked from the description or comment of a geotagged Flickr Photo to fly you that location in Google Earth). I tried out one of the examples and decided to give it a go.

My next challenge was to find the gps location for my photos, I tried using Get-a-map from Ordnance Survey. I was able to pinpoint the place the photograph was taken and was given a Grid reference but I didn’t know how to convert this into a gps location, if anyone could tell me that would be great. I then tried to use GoogleMaps to get the gps data, as with get-a-map I could find the place but this time I couldn’t find any location data. My next stop was GoogleEarth, the mapping data wasn’t as good as the previous two so I guessed at exactly where the photo was taken but it did give me a longitude and latitude figure.

Now I had the data I revisted my Flickr photos and when into my C2C set to see if I can geotag some of the photos I took while cycling across England. A selected my photo of the Gateshead Millenium Bridge as I thought this would be a an easy place to find. Google Earth returned me 54 58′11.24″ N 1 35′57.11″ W, so I tagged the photo:

• geo:lon=1.355711
• geo:lat=54.581124
• geotagged

I then copied the simple html code from FlickrFly into the description for the photo, it appeared like this:

Fly to this location
(Requires Google Earth)

I was so excited and clicked on Fly to this location, I told my browser to open the file with GoogleEarth. GoogleEarth booted up and started flying around, unfortunately I ended up not on the Gateshead bridge! I had a look around the preferences on Google Earth and noticed I could change the Lat/Lon from Degrees, Minutes, Seconds to Degrees. I went back to where the bridge actually is and I got the following, lat 54.969780 lon -1.599194, so I deleted my original tags and changed them to these:

• geo:lon=-1.599194
• geo:lat=54.969780

I clicked on the fly to this location link again and it worked - how cool was that! I then did another photo to check I had it cracked and it worked yet again, I was so excited I had to show my wife - I think she was impressed.

Just think of all the different applications for this in learning, school trips - geotag the photos and people could watch the journey you made, the romans study that hopefully Ewan and I will sort out soon etc.