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Hardware Hacking

Tagging Photos With GPS Coordinates 123

Posted by timothy from the good-for-areas-51-through-67 dept.
ptorrone writes "As part of a camera mod project to make a low-cost aerial photography device we started finding other uses for the camera hack. This first part of this series is tagging photos with GPS coordinates by automating a camera and GPS unit, it's a DIY Black Box for now with interesting applications and other uses. Ideally, this may encourage the next EXIF data schema to support GPS and other information."
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Tagging Photos With GPS Coordinates More

Tagging Photos With GPS Coordinates

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  • 3D Jigsaw puzzle (Score:5, Interesting)

    by .tardo. ( 790129 ) on Friday September 17, 2004 @05:54PM (#10280758)
    This would be great if it also tagged the direction of the photo as well as the focal length.
    That way some sort of virtual vacation wiki could be constructed from it.
    • Yes. I was about to comment about this being a feature that tags specific coordinates at which whatever is being photographed are not at.

    • Re:3D Jigsaw puzzle (Score:2, Informative)

      by pbrammer ( 526214 )
      Focal length is recorded in most high-end digital cameras... The Canon 10D I own does.
    • Damned it all!!

      I so totally thought of all that two years ago. It was going to be my senior research project for my major and I'd get all sorts of kickass attention for it. Evil bastard that I am I planned to patent it and make enough money from that that I'd never have to actually get a real job and just stay in school for another decade.

      It was all born out of an idea of mine to take all of my pictures and put them on my website. Then I'd draw up a map of my home, town, and university with little camera
      • That still sounds like a very cool idea. As someone who has craploads of pictures [severinghaus.org] with only very crude methods of searching through them, that would be truly fantastic. When I think "I want the picture I took of ____", remembering where I took it seems like it would be pretty easy most of the time. It would be a great tool. Let me know when you get your software working ;).
    • Did you mean using the camera's focal length as a rangefinder -- i.e. determine the distance of the subject from the camera? That's a good idea!

      Summarizing:
      1. A 2 axis accelerometer (mounted on camera, to get orientation of body)
      2. An electronic compass (mounted on camera, to get absolute heading - GPS isn't good for this when walking)
      3. GPS coordinates (to get Lat., Long., altitude, time)
      4. Camera focus and zoom information (rangefinder)

      Data from these 4 things gives enough information for different pic

  • To make the location info complete... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by blcamp ( 211756 ) on Friday September 17, 2004 @05:58PM (#10280785) Homepage

    It would also be nice to get altitude and the direction (in 3-D) the picture was taken.

    • The altitude information is available from the Forerunner unit so it'd be easy to add it too. That's all the information you get from the XML stream though (lat, long, alt). It doesn't give you direction, and the Forerunner unit used doesn't support things like barometric pressure.

      Neil

    • Flightgear Scenery! (Score:5, Interesting)

      by privaria ( 583781 ) on Friday September 17, 2004 @06:18PM (#10280927) Homepage
      Imagine thousands of Flightgear [flightgear.org] fans all taking pictures from hilltops and airplanes and submitting them to a server that performs geometric transformations on the images, per the location data, and adds to a downloadable database [flightgear.org] of free scenery.
    • Altitude is already part of the GPS coordinates, at least on the unit's I've used. Granted, it's been a few years and they were the military PLUGRs.

      Direction is much harder to include. You need to have a magnetic compass and level added to the camera. The compass gets you magnetic north; using the latitude(sp?) and longitude portions of the GPS coordinates, you can get the magnetic declination for that location, and now you have true north and the direction the camera is pointing.

      The level tells you wh

    • GPS provides altitude if you have 4 satellites in view (and most units will continue to make determinations based on the last available altitude if not), so this is not a problem.

      Camera orientation can be determined extremely cheaply with a cheap electronic compass in a gimball and (optionally for more precision) a 3 axis accelerometer. The accelerometer can be pretty much the cheapest type available since it doesn't even have to be really precise, it just has to be able to determine the direction of gravi
    • Is that even possible? I mean, GPS only takes one point right, and would it be possible to know which way you're pointing?
    • I've heard it stated that the porn industry drives a lot of technology and facilitates standards - GIFs and 900 numbers back in the 90's, Internet, file sharing, broadband (no pun intended), etc.

      The first thing I thought of when reading the article (I know.. I'm not supposed to read it before commenting...) was to imagine the chat-room housewife who doesn't realize that her camera is capturing her GPS coordinates as she does a strip show for the boys in a chatroom. Next thing you know, 100 local geeks co

    • Need:
      GPS coordinates
      Compass direction
      Altitude
      Pitch (useful for shooting at a down or up angle)
      Heading direction in 3 axis (different than compass) (think rocket, boat or car nav system taking the pix)
      Elapsed time (since start of day/race/vaca)
      Sequence number (how many pix since start of day/race/vaca)
      Photos-this-camera (how many since camera was new)
      camera operational details as in previous posts and that are already in exif

  • Degree confluence project (Score:3, Interesting)

    by rmadhuram ( 525803 ) on Friday September 17, 2004 @06:00PM (#10280793)
    Would be helpful for this http://www.confluence.org/ [confluence.org]

  • Coralized links (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 17, 2004 @06:00PM (#10280798)
    camera mod project [nyud.net]

    tagging photos with GPS coordinates [nyud.net]

    EXIF data schema [nyud.net]

  • Exif already has fields for GPS (Score:4, Informative)

    by MDMurphy ( 208495 ) on Friday September 17, 2004 @06:02PM (#10280814)
    See exif.org for info.

    Robophoto, OziExplorer support tagging the images from live GPS or from a log file.

    • Re:Exif already has fields for GPS (Score:4, Informative)

      by LS ( 57954 ) on Friday September 17, 2004 @06:28PM (#10280982) Homepage
      This is true. EXIF 2.1 defines an IFD section specifically for GPS. From page 56 of the EXIF 2.1 standard:

      Table 12 GPS Attribute Information

      (I munged this into a list and is highly abridged. I tried 10 different ways to post the table but Slashdot's fuckwitted lameness filter is fucking lame itself):

      GPSVersionID, GPSLatitudeRef, GPSLatitude,
      GPSLongitudeRef, GPSLongitude, GPSAltitudeRef, GPSAltitude, GPSTimeStamp, GPSSatellites, GPSStatus, GPSMeasureMode, GPSDOP, GPSSpeedRef, GPSSpeed, GPSTrackRef, GPSTrack,
      GPSImgDirectionRef, GPSImgDirection, GPSMapDatum, GPSDestLatitudeRef, GPSDestLatitude, GPSDestLongitudeRef, GPSDestLongitude, GPSDestBearingRef, GPSDestBearing,
      GPSDestDistanceRef, GPSDestDistance

      LS

      • Re:Exif already has fields for GPS (Score:4, Informative)

        by bobbis.u ( 703273 ) on Friday September 17, 2004 @06:36PM (#10281030)
        You beat me to it... sort of. Here is a full, human-readable list of the fields supported in exif 2.2.
        • GPS tag version
        • North or South Latitude
        • Latitude
        • East or West Longitude
        • Longitude
        • Altitude reference
        • Altitude
        • GPS time (atomic clock)
        • GPS satellites used for measurement
        • GPS receiver status
        • GPS measurement mode
        • Measurement precision
        • Speed unit
        • Speed of GPS receiver
        • Reference for direction of movement
        • Direction of movement
        • Reference for direction of image
        • Direction of image
        • Geodetic survey data used
        • Reference for latitude of destination
        • Latitude of destination
        • Reference for longitude of destination
        • Longitude of destination
        • Reference for bearing of destination
        • Bearing of destination
        • Reference for distance to destination
        • Distance to destination
        • Name of GPS processing method
        • Name of GPS area
        • GPS date
        • GPS differential correction

    • Further, VERY early digital SLRs such as the ones made by Kodak(the ones with the giant packs underneath the Nikon body) had means of recording GPS coordinates with the image.

      Far as I know, nobody ever cared to actually use it, which is why only a handful of cameras even claim to do it in their specs, and even if they do, there's no way to actually use it (no cables available, no software or instructions, etc).

      I doubt that will ever change much. Yeah, it's a toy. Yeah, cameraphones have GPS and camera

      • The story I have heard is that it was a military request, though civil engineers pushed for it too.

        which is why
        (1) that kodak also recorded which direction it was looking

        (2) the exif format can includes full GPS constellation and time info, as well as just lat/long -so you can do post-processing to get a better position

  • I'm OUTRAGED! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Saeed al-Sahaf ( 665390 ) on Friday September 17, 2004 @06:03PM (#10280820) Homepage
    Of course if the Government where developing this technology, people would be outraged, huffing and puffing about Big Brother...

    But instead of a specific data source (the GPS unit), why not develop a standard and just have a data plug in the side of the cam to plug *whatever* data source into? GPS, keyboard, clock, speedometer, altimeter, whatever ...

    • Who is moderating this stuff.

      This not flamebait. It is insightful.

      why not develop a standard

      Great idea. Make this ability standard for other means of embedding data and other operations via USB.

      Also, I agree. I think we would be outraged if the gov't was developing this.

      Why is this flamebait? MODUP

  • This would be a beautiful standard... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by LostCluster ( 625375 ) * on Friday September 17, 2004 @06:03PM (#10280821)
    I'd love to see this kind of thing built into cameras in the same way that Kodak is known to symbolically code film they sell to indicate the manufacture date of the film.

    High resolution? No need for that... it's just a nice little trap for people trying to say a staged photo proves something that it really doesn't. If the original film indicates a year after the date you're claiming or that you were nowhere near the place you claim the photo was taken, then you're a liar and we can forget everything you had to say...
  • Doesn't 3m or IBM have the patent to "geostamping"... I wonder if the idea will take off enough to warrent a "geostamp" data type in sql?

  • EXIF already supports GPS tags (Score:5, Insightful)

    by neile ( 139369 ) on Friday September 17, 2004 @06:03PM (#10280830)
    I wrote an app that tags my images based on GPS coordinates from my Garmin Forerunner. If you look in the EXIF spec you'll find that there are tags for latitude, longitude, and altitude (all of which the Forerunner gives you).

    If you're using GDI+ on a Windows machine you can add the tags into your image pretty easily using either native code or your favourite .NET flavour.

    Neil

  • Great! (Score:3, Funny)

    by keiferb ( 267153 ) on Friday September 17, 2004 @06:04PM (#10280831) Homepage
    Now my insurance company will be able to take a picture of me when their little black box in my car senses I'm doing something illegal. Two shots that are both location and time stamped will provide exact proof of how fast I was going, nevermind the fact that there was a dead hooker in the back seat...

  • been done.. ask around (Score:5, Interesting)

    by molo ( 94384 ) on Friday September 17, 2004 @06:04PM (#10280832) Journal
    I don't know if anyone remembers this, but there was a series of stories on Slashdot about a guy that was taking high-quality photos of the California coastline to study erosion. He was sued by Barbra Streissand or someone for taking photos of her house. Anyway, his camera system recorded the location that the photos were taken using GPS. You should talk to him to see what he did.

    -molo

  • Done along time ago (Score:3, Informative)

    by kraksmokr ( 216277 ) on Friday September 17, 2004 @06:05PM (#10280845) Journal
    This was done along time ago with Kodak cameras. The cameras actually run a scripting language. A script can be written to read from a serial port and superimpose the coordinates onto the picture much like the time/date stamps.

  • Similar (Score:3, Interesting)

    by bluewee ( 677282 ) on Friday September 17, 2004 @06:05PM (#10280846)
    Just reciently I did something similar to this, with my Canon A70 digital camera, I was able to take pictures with my laptop, using Canon's Remote Control, and at the same time get the GPS data from my Garmin.

    It worked well, but I was not able to get altitude nor direction data, I plan on the future hooking up two servos to allow for directional and azumuth data to be entered as well.

  • All this did was record time and gps cordinates on the Garmin GPS unit, and have the camera continiously take pictures at a rate of 800 photos an hour. You still have to process the GPS data from the garmin unit and corrolate it with the app USAPhotoMaps to trace it out.

  • synchronize before and correlate later (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Speare ( 84249 ) on Friday September 17, 2004 @06:07PM (#10280857) Homepage Journal
    The typical approach is to synchronize the clocks beforehand, and correlate gps track data with capture timestamps after getting back home.

    While new cameras offer GPS hookups, I imagine compatibility and logistics is a hassle.

    Sometime, there'll be GPS in the camera, but then you have to take pictures with the camera itself in a position to receive GPS signal, and the long camera wakeup times will be even longer.

    K I S S. Use a GPS that can be enhanced and specialized. Use a camera that is made for taking pictures. Correlate the data as convenient.

    • An easier approach (if you can afford it) is to buy a late model DSLR that supports this "natively" - for instance, here is Nikon's writeups about it [nikonusa.com] which tags the image are you take it. Combine that with wireless base unit [nikonusa.com] (the latest one support 802.11g instead of b) and you are ready to rock-n-roll. Digicam vendors have historically used the USB port mostly for sending images OUT ... but they are realizing it may be "interesting" to use it to feed information IN as in this case.

      Don't really need it fo

      • For certain people, it is important for the timestamp/position to be as exact as possible. For most applications, however, correlation of position to within 10 seconds (interpolated linearly) should be fine.

        I don't think you'd want to lug a 6 pound camera plus lenses up Longs Peak if you could carry a small camera and a small GPS unit. If you're not making poster-sized prints of your hiking trips, the correlation method would be fine. Just use a GPS unit that can store a track (i.e., points every 1 seco
      • Regrettably, those two options are mutually exclusive - GPS support was dropped from D2H and D2X, and WiFi support was added with D2H and D2X.
    • and a bluetooth camera. Write a bit of software on the camera to snag 1) the time and 2) the co-ordinates.

      You could then keep the GPS in your pocket or strapped on your backpack.

  • Clever. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ottergoose ( 770022 ) on Friday September 17, 2004 @06:09PM (#10280867) Homepage
    This would be really slick for storm-chasing. Often times you find yourself in the middle of [some flat state] taking pictures of a storm, and once you go home you may very well forget exactly where you were.

    Also, I recently saw a TV show where they had to track down a killer based off of some digital pictures a murder victim had snapped shortly before getting killed. This technology would have made that murder much easier to solve... of course this probably has never happened in real life.

  • May become a "standard" feature in a few years... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by FerretFrottage ( 714136 ) on Friday September 17, 2004 @06:10PM (#10280877)
    The biggest problem I see with GPS and cameras [digital] right now is battery life. Get GPS fixes from the necessary satellites can really run down your batteries fast. This is one area where camera phone may have a advantage; if they are GPS enabled (i.e. motorla iDen, etc.) and can use AGPS from the phone network, it may help with battery life. Nevertheless, as GPS receivers become more efficient, I can see them being integerated in to cameras to provide this type of information. It would actually make for a great vacation application. Take photos with GPS coords, upload photos to computer, computer has an app that "maps" your photos to where they were taken on a global/regional map. Throw in the dates and the app could construct a trip timelime showing all the locations where you took your photos (all the while playing the Family Vacation theme song).

    • The Navman GPS4410 is a bluetooth GPS module, which has a battery life of 30 hours. See here [navman.com] for more details.

      While it's primarily used for car navigation, you can get GPS NMEA data out of it (here [vancouver-webpages.com] is a good info site) which is the standard for GPS receivers.

      It would be relatively easy to write a Palm/IPAQ/other app to record coordinates/tracks so you could tie them into your photos later.

      Rob :)

    • The biggest problem I see with GPS and cameras [digital] right now is battery life. Get GPS fixes from the necessary satellites can really run down your batteries fast.

      Are you sure about that? My (rather old) Garmin handheld GPS runs for about 12 solid hours continuously on a set of new AA alkaline penlight batteries. But, my digital camera is only good for about 2 hours on a set of the same AA batteries, and only about 20 minutes if I leave its LCD screen turned on.
    • Take photos with GPS coords, upload photos to computer, computer has an app that "maps" your photos to where they were taken on a global/regional map. Throw in the dates and the app could construct a trip timelime showing all the locations where you took your photos (all the while playing the Family Vacation theme song).

      You should mail this to yourself, keep it sealed, and submit it as prior art when XYZ corp gets a patent for it.
      • You should mail this to yourself, keep it sealed, and submit it as prior art when XYZ corp gets a patent for it.
        No need, it's now SlashArchived with date and time stamp (and when Google cache it it will be GoogleArchived as well - long enough for the Wayback Machine to get it too?)
        The web can usefully (and worryingly/annoyingly) persistent.

  • Interesting link (Score:3, Informative)

    by bluewee ( 677282 ) on Friday September 17, 2004 @06:13PM (#10280889)
    It seems that there is also a software based solution as well: http://www.inertia-llc.com/sandbox/topofusiontest/ [inertia-llc.com]

    • Re:Interesting link (Score:3, Informative)

      by 3dr ( 169908 )
      I have been using the featured software, TopoFusion, for nearly a year to map trail networks. It keys photographs to positions by matching timestamps, a very easy and effective technique.

      It's great software if you're into this kinda thing.

  • The new Nikon D2x supports this natively (Score:4, Informative)

    by neile ( 139369 ) on Friday September 17, 2004 @06:15PM (#10280903)
    It's almost enough to make me give up my Canon. Almost, except for all those pesky Canon lenses I have... :)

    "External GPS units that adhere to the NMEA 0183 specification are supported (the new MC-35 adapter cable, which connects to the 10-pin remote port on the camera and provides both an RS-232 serial port and 10-pin remote port, is required); latitude, longitude and altitude can be stored in a photo's metadata. The D2X's date and time can also be set automatically when a GPS unit is connected"

    Full walkthrough of the new features in the D2x at http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/multi_page.asp?ci d=7-6459-7204-7205.

    Neil

  • It's been done before. (Score:3, Informative)

    by sakusha ( 441986 ) on Friday September 17, 2004 @06:16PM (#10280909)
    Nikon has a new camera [robgalbraith.com] with a connector to GPS units.

    ...GPS support for the recording of location information with shooting data: Location information such as latitude, longitude and altitude can be transferred from a GPS device and recorded with the shooting data for an image. Nikon has developed the new MC-35 cable (optional) for connection to NMEA0183-compatible GPS devices.

  • I've *so* wanted this for a long long time (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    As mentioned by others, the three features that I've been salivating over is:
    - Location
    - Direction
    - Altitude
    Just the first one would be nice, but everything would be really neat.

    Especially neat would be software that could take advantage of this information and create 3D models complete with textures by stitching together the files.
    • I'm on the flight team at purdue university and this would be unbelievably useful for competition. We have an event called nav where a navigator plots a flight course given lats/longs and a hint on what they're looking for. They must plan times to the second and fuel burn to the tenth of a gallon. Not too hard until you realize your only items are a map, calculator, plotter (ruler with protractor), and a stopwatch. Combine this and a plane with no avionics it gets mighty hard to stay right on course. B
  • If you carry your GPSr with you while photographing, you can later load the track history onto your computer, and correlate the timestamps in the photos' EXIF data with the timestamps the GPSr stores in the track history.

    I did this a while ago, with the program outputting an SVG map of my track history, with clickable dots everywhere a picture was taken. Click the dot, see the picture. I overlaid it all on a sattelite map of the city (Winnipeg), just because I could.

    The critical step is that you need to t
  • It looks like it works well for in car use or when weight is not an issue.

    I'd like to see a stripped down version that could be more readily used in model plane applications.

    A guy I work with has stripped down an old Palm Pilot and is hacking it to process air speed data in order to adjust the flaps. I don't know how much a glider could carry. If you could have automated flight, GPS, images and some form of communications that would be such a cool toy.

    What kind of plane are you planning on mounting
  • It was great for crime photos, surveying, construction, etc. IIRC they had a snap on module later.

    http://www.kodak.com/global/en/service/professiona l/tib/tib7061.jhtml?id=0.1.14.34.5.110&lc=en [kodak.com]

    They seem to hava abandoned it. Silly to do for such a simple and useful feature. Hope the new project takes off.

  • Kodak DC390 (Score:3, Informative)

    by Multispin ( 49784 ) on Friday September 17, 2004 @06:31PM (#10280999)
    Um, my Kodak DC390 (and other Digita-based cameras) supported this ages ago. Someone wrote a Digita app that talked to a GPS via the serial port and added EXIF tags to the images. Heck, I think that Kodak even sold a Garmin GPS and a special bracket that screwed into the tripod hole to hold the GPS.

  • Some GPS resources (Score:5, Informative)

    by SlideGuitar ( 445691 ) on Friday September 17, 2004 @06:42PM (#10281074)
    This isn't my web site but I wish it were:
    http://www.geosnapper.com/ [geosnapper.com]

    There exist Japan only (not ever marketed in the US) point and shoot cameras that already record GPS data directly. (Rioch... and some other brand I haven't heard of.)

    And of course various Nikon pro models have this capacity, such as that used here:

    http://www.californiacoastline.org/ [californiacoastline.org]

    In the same vein, check out:
    http://apps.ecy.wa.gov/shorephotos/index.html [wa.gov]

    I haven't evaluated this: http://www.robogeo.com/home/ [robogeo.com]

    But I do own this, and it works well, as advertised to get a GPS read for each time at which you take a picture: http://www.geospatialexperts.com/ [geospatialexperts.com]

    At the above location, they happen to sell the Ricoh model that can record GPS out of the box.
  • ...already do this. The modular slot in the back of the new blue-ray ProDisc XDCAM cameras (which record in either DVCAM or IMX 30/40/50mbit MPEG2 I-frame only) which is normally occupied by a diversity VHF wireless mic receiver will also accomodate Sony's GPS unit. The unit has no screen etc... it just slots in and metadata is tagged to the file. Great for covering golf, marathons etc so you can tell where on the track the shot is, or on which hole.
    • "...so you can tell where on the track the shot is...."

      or, more precisely, where the camera was when the photo was taken.
      • "where the camera was when the photo was taken."

        or, more precisely, where the rear half of the camera was when 29.97 photos per second were taken.

        perhaps you could find better use for your time? 0.o
        • No flaming intended in my original reply but, having researched the use of such a rig and its applicability to the type of field survey work done by the company I used to work for, more than a handful of others [PHB's, typically] were under the impression that the camera interpolated the exact location of the target structure being captured and didn't immediately grasp that the GPS coords were for the camera rig itself. That was my point.

  • Has been done already (Score:4, Informative)

    by canavan ( 14778 ) on Friday September 17, 2004 @06:55PM (#10281173)
    In the past there was a kit for some Kodak cameras to connect a normal handheld GPS receiver with NEMA output to the serial port of the camera. I think they overlayed the coordiantes as text onto the picture. I doubt the newer cameras even have a serial port, but the old ones are dirt cheap now.

    Here's an article on connecting a GPS to a Kodak digital SLR [kodak.com], and if you google a bit, you will find that most of the old digita-OS based cameras (e.g. DC290) support this.

  • Always fun (Score:4, Informative)

    by snillfisk ( 111062 ) <mats.lindh@no> on Friday September 17, 2004 @06:59PM (#10281197) Homepage
    This is not really a new way to do stuff, and as several other has pointed out, the EXIF-standard already has fields for geographical placement. A new dimension is provided in the data, and allows us to do a whole new range of applications. We've built a small application on Symbian OS (currently running under Personal Java, and another solution in development running under Symbian OS natively) which tags images, audio and other information on a cellular phone (we use the Ericsson P900) with location (provided by an gps with a bluetooth interface).

    We've done several interesting projects in relevance to this, and the probably biggest field of usage would be the utility and maintenance industry.

    We're currently submitting the data from the phone, tagged with a location or a track, to a Java-based server. This server can in turn store the data locally to be retrieved from another phone with additional information (like a regular map) and/or pass the data on to a webserver where the repository can be browsed from a normal web browser. The application may be tested on The OneMap GeoMeta Browser Client [onemap.org]. This is part of Project OneMap [onemap.org], a project where we aim to build a completly free and freely managed geodata repository.

    There is still much work going on in this field, but the japanese are 2 years ahead of everyone else. Several of their phones already have built in GPS-receivers and tag the images they capture automagically (this was done as early as in 2002). There still isn't any regular consumer interest for this in Europe or the US, but we could all hope for a better future. :)
  • During my last motorcycle trip (http://photos.innersource.com/group/9976 [innersource.com]) all photos were GPS tagged and afterwards linked to satellite images/maps (http://maps.innersource.com/ [innersource.com]) While a manual process today, it would be fairly easy to automate it.
  • I hooked up my TiBook, a old Delorme Tripmate, my Treo, and my iSight and wrote a AppleScript that would put the GPS Cords in the picture that EvoCam took and then upload the picture and use XMLRPC to upload the coordinates to a database online.

    The picture component of the system didn't work for my trip but the XMLRPC through the Treo worked great. It was a trip to the East Coast from Chicago, and it got everything till we hit the dark territory of PA, when we lost the connection.

    It was a bloody mess of w

  • Where's Waldo? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Friday September 17, 2004 @07:18PM (#10281299) Homepage Journal
    My smartphone does E911, so it's got a minimal GPS receiver that can receive the raw GPS signal data at the time it snaps a picture. I'd love an app that added those coordinates to the JPG comment field, then sent them over its CDMA net connection for locating by higher-powered software at the server.

  • Microsoft (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Writer ( 746272 ) on Friday September 17, 2004 @07:20PM (#10281306)
    Didn't Microsoft already patent [uspto.gov] this? The patent mentions GPS data.

  • I'm confused (Score:2, Insightful)

    by gooman ( 709147 )
    Does this mean I'm my own Big Brother?

    "... and here's a picture of me in my tin-foil hat at coordinates XY..."

  • Umm Yeah? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Gaewyn L Knight ( 16566 ) <vaewyn AT wwwrogue DOT com> on Friday September 17, 2004 @08:06PM (#10281610) Homepage Journal
    Hate to be a "been there... done that" type but my Nikon Coolpix 950 has done that for years. If a GPS putting out NMEA is attached to the serial port it places that last lat/lon/alt in the EXIF data.

    Works great... and has for several years :}
    • I have a 950 and a few generations of Garmen GPS sets. The folklore as represented by Google searchs on the web and in groups is that Nikon never implemented the "GPS in" feature although it was mentioned in their initial advertising for the 950. I missed the feature in the advertising to be honest or would have been trying to get it work for it all these years. Nikon also claimed a GPS in capability for a older Digital SLR, the E3. I have the Fuji version of that one and could never get the GPS to work th
  • It was a 2002 Toshiba model [3gtoday.com] with au/KDDI [kddi.com] service. I could tag any photo with the GPS coordinates and mail it off to let people know where I was. It's nice to look back at old shots and be able to find the location on a map, but I'm sure it can be used for many more practical purposes.
  • This will be really exciting when very large quantities of people's images are brought together and the GPS data is used to make some crazy new kind of map / art / thing.

    BE!

    .
    -shpoffo

    • Flickr Mod (Score:3, Interesting)

      by blindpoetx ( 308478 )
      Currently, you can get an rss feed for certain tags on publicly available photos. It would be interesting if they extended this feature for GPS coordinates. (ie, if you want to see what's going on in Central Park, at your college, at Mt Everest, or at Mardi Gras.)

      It also would make for some interesting searches. In theory, if they kept track of points, vectors, and times... and lets say that you kept track of the same info, then you could search for all photos that include you!! Also, depending on if th
  • http://gallery.menalto.com/modules.php?op=modload& name=News&file=index
  • Check this out: http://www.redhensystems.com/products/multimedia_m apping_software/mediamapper/default.asp?sm=2 It records GPS coordinates to a video after it is encoded as sound. While playing it back, it deciphers the sound to obtain GPS coordinates, and geo-references entire video to a basemap as it was recorded.

  • Nikon (Score:1)

    by Djinh ( 92332 )
    The Nikon D2H and D2X already support this out of the box...
  • I keep waiting for someone else to point this out...

    Cameras timestamp their photos. GPSs can maintain tracklogs of where they go with timestamps. You don't have to connect them with a tangle of wires. Just keeep the time on your camera relatively close to right and post process the tracklog when you download the pictures.
  • Some over two years ago when the Nikon D1H and D1X came with support for GPS ;) I quote from http://www.naturfotograf.com/D2H_rev01.html

    "Support for GPS, a very nice feature of D1X and D1H, has quite unexpectedly been removed from D2H."

    So this isn't exactly a new thing though..
  • Microsoft Research has had this site up for a while:

    http://wwmx.org/ [wwmx.org]

    The World Wide Media Exchange project is geared towards sharing GeoCoded Photos. The project is cool but I found more interesing the downloads section which have some slick tools for downloading tracks from Garmin GPS devices as well for stamping images with location info. A GPS is not required for geocoding the images since the Location Stamping tool allows for manual stamping using MapPoint maps. There is also a tool for creating a w

  • most half decent camera's allow you to take a photo using a remote flash so
    being essentially a switch it shouldnt be too difficult to use this as a trigger
    signal "picture taken" to trigger the collection of time stamped gps data.

    just a thought

  • Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday September 18, 2004 @08:17AM (#10284269)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • I work for the Scientific Imaging Systems group at Eastman Kodak. http://www.kodak.com/go/scientific [kodak.com]. Several years ago I conceived of, and wrote the software for a product we called the Field Imaging System FIS265. It was based on the DC265 which was the first Kodak camera to run the DigitaOS. I wrote a suite of scripts that ran in the camera and a plug in for the popular GIS mapping software ArcView. Another group at Kodak developed a nice bracket that held the camera together with a Garmin GPS III+.

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