How To Use Your iPhone And Lightroom To Geotag Photos [Video]

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Lightroom 4 lets you easily geotag photos taken with an ordinary camera
Lightroom 4 lets you easily geotag photos taken with an ordinary camera

Before our full review next week, here’s a great little how-to guide on using geotagging in Lightroom 4. Adobe’s photo-editing and cataloging app has caught up with iPhoto and Aperture in its latest version, and you can now view any photos with embedded GPS co-ordinates on an in-app map. This means any of your iPhone photos can be browsed by location, which is a surprisingly useful tool.

But what if you want to reverse tag your photos? Say your camera doesn’t have GPS, but you have a track log recorded on a GPS device or with an iPhone app. How do you put this data together in a useful way? Below, Adobe’s Terry White shows us how.

I’m no fan of Apple’s pro apps. I find them clunky and unintuitive compared to the regular iApps, so I’m all-in on Lightroom. But I have been missing GPS, and I do like to take photos with a non-GPS-enabled Panasonic GF1.

Terry’s tutorial shows you just how easy it is to import a GPX track log into Lightroom, sync up the time zones if you’re a slacker about changing your camera’s clock when you travel, and doing an auto lookup on the locations to not only place them on the map but write the address and country into the photos’ metadata.

The iPhone app Terry uses to create his log is called Geotag Photos Pro ($4 in the App Store), but anything that can output a GPS files should do. I use various apps to track long bike rides, and these can usually export the right format to use here, making them double useful.

And of course, any photos imported direct to Lightroom from your iPhone will be tagged already.

[Via John Nack]

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