Yesterday we rode up to an old abandoned mine called Ida Belle. Bagger had the GPS tracking, and we took a few photo’s along the way. In the past my attempts to get GPS tracks on maps on the Mac have proven futile, but this time I succeeded. Here’s how I did it and what it looks like…
Yesterday we rode up to an old abandoned mine called Ida Belle. Bagger had the GPS tracking, and we took a few photo’s along the way. In the past my attempts to get GPS tracks on maps on the Mac have proven futile, but this time I succeeded. Here’s how I did it and what it looks like
Here’s the order of events:
1) Get the GPS tracks in a format Google Earth can read (KML)
2) Get the photo’s on flickr
3) GeoTag the photo’s
4) Wire it together in Google Earth
GPSbabel is the tool to change GPS data from any one of the gazillion formats to another. The problem is it’s a bit of a pain to use. Enter the web service version of GPSBabel from GPSVisualizer. Choose the input/output format select your file, run and download. Double click on the generated .kml file and wa-la, it opens in Google Earth.
Getting the photo’s on flickr is simple enough, export from iPhoto with flickrexport.
The next step is Geo Tagging the photo’s. To do this, you need to know the latitude and longitude of the location where you took the photo. That can come from the waypoints we marked along the way, or by just placing a place marker on the map in Google Earth, edit that place marker and look at the latitude and longitude values. Note you need to change the default way Google Earth displays Lat/Lon from deg, minutes, sec to degrees so that the numbers are displayed as decimal values. Once you have these values, you tag the photo’s in flickr as described here.
The last step almost seems like magic. You simply add a magic link (www.robogeo.com/Flickr2Map/) on the description of the photo, save and select the link and wala, robogo magically creates the placemark in Google Earth with the necessary HTML in the placemark description to render the photo. Here’s a snapshot:
Pretty cool, but even cooler if you grab the .kml file and fly around it yourself!
