I went for a drive Saturday, starting in North-Eastern Madison County and continuing up into Winchester turning East on US. 64 and heading up Hwy 56 into Altamont with a few detours along the way. I think a map would better explain the route, so without further ado:
View Larger Map
Now, if you use Lightroom and/or Smugmug stay tuned, I’m going to outline what tools I used to make this map possible.
The first step was collecting the geo-data, I use a Columbus V-900 GPS Bluetooth reciever/logger (Which is also marketed as the Visiontac VGPS900). The V-900 is small, light, and has an impressive 24hr battery life with 1 entry per second, in slower update modes, the battery life extends up to a month.
The next task is to actually Geo-tag the images, I shoot in raw, and use Adobe Lightroom, so this has been an issue in the past; Lightroom 2.x has no native geographic data capabilities, and most software that come with GPS’s have no support for RAW files, or have limited support. This problem has been COMPLETELY mitigated by Jeffrey Friedl. Jeffrey writes GREAT plug-ins for Lightroom, I’ve used his SmugMug export plugin for ages, and I love it! The GPS-Support plug-in exceeds my expectations of Jeffrey’s work. I’ll sidetrack here to talk about a great GPL licensed open sourced tool that Jeffrey leverages to really make his plug-in powerful. GPS Babel is a project that aims to make all GPS data types interchangeable, GPS-Support for Lightroom uses GPS-Babel to provide support for pretty much ANY GPS log file. It was a simple matter to point GPS-Support to the GPS Babel executable and set up the data type my device exports. GPS-Support allows you to set a time offset, which corrects for time zone differences between your camera and the GMT time that the GPS logs, this ensures the images match the correct positions in the log. One of the great features of GPS-Support is that as you export from your Lightroom catalog, its “Shadow Export” module can be set to write the geo tags to whatever filetype you’re exporting to, this works perfectly with all of Jeffrey’s export & upload plug-ins, geo-tagging the files, as they’re uploaded.
Thank you Jeffrey for making this process so simple!
To get the map you see here, I had to combine the KML feed output from Smugmug’s KML feed engine with a KML file hosted on my server with the track of our trip. I did this using Adam Franco’s excellent little KML Joiner PHP Script, it allows me to specify 2 KML files and dynamically merge them into a single overlay on Google Maps, giving us the map you see above.
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Fall Photo Drive
I went for a drive Saturday, starting in North-Eastern Madison County and continuing up into Winchester turning East on US. 64 and heading up Hwy 56 into Altamont with a few detours along the way. I think a map would better explain the route, so without further ado:
View Larger Map
Now, if you use Lightroom and/or Smugmug stay tuned, I’m going to outline what tools I used to make this map possible.
The first step was collecting the geo-data, I use a Columbus V-900 GPS Bluetooth reciever/logger (Which is also marketed as the Visiontac VGPS900). The V-900 is small, light, and has an impressive 24hr battery life with 1 entry per second, in slower update modes, the battery life extends up to a month.
The next task is to actually Geo-tag the images, I shoot in raw, and use Adobe Lightroom, so this has been an issue in the past; Lightroom 2.x has no native geographic data capabilities, and most software that come with GPS’s have no support for RAW files, or have limited support. This problem has been COMPLETELY mitigated by Jeffrey Friedl. Jeffrey writes GREAT plug-ins for Lightroom, I’ve used his SmugMug export plugin for ages, and I love it! The GPS-Support plug-in exceeds my expectations of Jeffrey’s work. I’ll sidetrack here to talk about a great GPL licensed open sourced tool that Jeffrey leverages to really make his plug-in powerful. GPS Babel is a project that aims to make all GPS data types interchangeable, GPS-Support for Lightroom uses GPS-Babel to provide support for pretty much ANY GPS log file. It was a simple matter to point GPS-Support to the GPS Babel executable and set up the data type my device exports. GPS-Support allows you to set a time offset, which corrects for time zone differences between your camera and the GMT time that the GPS logs, this ensures the images match the correct positions in the log. One of the great features of GPS-Support is that as you export from your Lightroom catalog, its “Shadow Export” module can be set to write the geo tags to whatever filetype you’re exporting to, this works perfectly with all of Jeffrey’s export & upload plug-ins, geo-tagging the files, as they’re uploaded.
Thank you Jeffrey for making this process so simple!
To get the map you see here, I had to combine the KML feed output from Smugmug’s KML feed engine with a KML file hosted on my server with the track of our trip. I did this using Adam Franco’s excellent little KML Joiner PHP Script, it allows me to specify 2 KML files and dynamically merge them into a single overlay on Google Maps, giving us the map you see above.