Geotag DSLR images using an iPhone and a Mac
One of the nice things about modern camera phones and even some regular cameras uses GPS to tag photos and embed the coordinates in the pictures EXIF data. But wouldn’t it be great if you could do that with your fancy DSLR camera photos as well? Programs like iPhoto, Aperture and the upcoming Adobe Lightroom 4 can show you your pictures on a map. Many online photo sites like Flickr also uses the GPS data in the pictures to display them on a map.
Use your iPhone to geotag pictures
There’s an easy way of adding the GPS coordinates to your RAW or jpg images using your iPhone as a GPS logger. To get it to work correctly, make sure that the clock on your digital camera is the same as your iPhone. This will help when adding the coordinates later. There are some free alternative apps for iPhone like Gps Stone GPX, but I’m using an app called MotionX-GPS for logging when I walk around taking pictures. All you have to do is to start the app and create a new track. Turn off the display and put it in your pocket. Just have the app running while you photograph. After you are finished, use the share function in MotionX-GPS to send the track data by email to your Mac. You get some statistics in the email, but also two included files. One .kmz file for Google Earth, but it’s the .gpx file your interested in. Just save the file to your hard disk. Download your images to your computer. I usually use Image Capture, a very underrated program, and download the images to a folder on the desktop. Start up GPSPhotoLinker, a free program for Macintosh. Import your .gpx track data and photos and use the automatic batch function in the program to save the GPS data into the image. Now you are ready to import your images to your favorite image handling program like iPhoto, Aperture or Adobe Lightroom. So now when you upload pictures to Flickr, the GPS location is embedded in the image.
Update. I’m going to try out an universal app called GeoTagr soon. Come back soon for a full review. Here’s a description on how to use it with Lightroom 4
