Grab Ad-Hoc Geotags For Camera Photos With Your iPhone

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geoiphoto

 

 

One of the best things about shooting with the iPhone is that it automatically puts all of your photos on a map. This is even better when you’re traveling, as you can relive the trip with a virtual tour, or use the geolocation data to check where that awesome restaurant was where you got poisoned.

It’s easy. Sadly, the same can’t be said about pictures snapped with a regular camera. But there’s an elegant solution that uses your iPhone, and without worrying about recording and importing GPS tracks.

As the venerable Derrick Story points out in his latest blog post, the solution is to just snap an extra picture with your iPhone. Then, back at the computer you can copy its location data to all the other pictures you took in the same place.

If you use Lightroom, then you should click on the iPhone photo, then click to select all the other pictures taken in the shape spot, and then choose to “Sync” them all. The Sync button is down at the bottom of the right panel in the Library module, and will bring up a dialog box to let you choose what metadata gets copied. Find the Camera Info section, check the appropriate boxes and hit Sync.

fig 2
Lightroom lets you tag your photos easily.

 

In iPhoto it’s even easier, especially if you use Photo Stream so your iPhone pictures will already be there in the library. Just select the iPhone picture with the location your want and copy it (⌘-C does the trick). Then select the photos you want to geotag, and then choose Edit>Paste Location. You’re done.

fig 3
Easy-peasy, lemon squeezy.

Of course, this does mean that you need to snap an iPhone photo for every picture taken with your camera, so I still just start up my little Garmin EDGE 500 bike computer, toss it in my bag and import the GPS track later. It’s more involved at the end, but easier when you’re out shooting.

Source: Digital Story

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