As if your mind numbing slide shows just aren’t enough, GPICSYNC can plot them on a map for you…
I get questions. When I brought up Geocoding recently, eyes glazed over and the most interested anyone could get was “what was that again?” I’m apparently too much geek playing the geekiest game in the world.
Geocoding is the addition of location data to your photos so they can be used with any ‘geocode aware’ application like Picasa/Google Earth, Flickr, loc.alize.us, and others. These tools plot where pictures were taken on a map, providing a rich set of information for your snapshots and avoiding the dreaded “what is this again?!?” when you forget to religiously catalog every image you’ve ever taken.
You DO catalog all of your pictures, right? 😉
While I haven’t used the tool yet, I have seen it in action from behind the chair and it is darned impressive at first glance. A full review will be forthcoming, but in the mean time all you need are a set of pictures and some recollection of where you were when you took them. If the pictures have a date and time stamp you can combine them with a recorded track from your GPS to automatically plot where you were when you took them. This is quite helpful if you’re like me and can’t remember where you were 10 minutes ago, with or without a GPS.
The first thing you ought to do is make sure you know how to record a track on your GPS. Second, make sure your pictures are inserting a date/time stamp in there (really, this is a good idea anyway for your future sanity).
I recently completed what I call a “Crush” type event, where a few of us dash out before dawn to see how much ground we can cover and how many Geocaching finds we can log in a predetermined period of time. Pictures were snapped all over the place and it sure would be nice to have a log of the day mapped out for others to check out. We’ll see. The obvious advantages of a tool like this are endless: planning events, recording a family trip or simply turning the old “pins in a map” model on its head.
Check that out and let me know if it’s any good. I’ll get to it eventually, but guest opinion is always appreciated.