We have recently been hiking in Bryce Canyon and Zion National Park in Utah and I decided to see if I could get Geotagging working on the Mac. Being an avid photographer I always have at least two cameras with me and this vacation was no exception and although I would have loved to have taken my DSLR space and weight wouldn't allow it so my trusty Canon G9 was my weapon of choice.
For my GPS I have a Garmin Vista Etrex which I have had for some time and I purchased the US National Park Topo 24K CD to provide detailed mapping of the area. The Etrex is a great little unit and has large buttons so can be used with gloved hands although the display can be a little small to see some of the detail - it is cheap and the battery life is amazing (if you don't use the backlight).
So I downloaded JetPhoto for the Mac which allows you to Geotag your photos with the GPS location and then map them onto Google Earth of you want to. The process is quite simple and all you have to make sure is that the clock on your camera and the GPS are syncronised (Use the GPS clock as the master as this is taken from the sattelite signal) - also make sure that the time zones are the same although this can be compensated for in JetPhoto when you do the Geotagging.
When you are out taking photos just keep the GPS switched on - there is no need to waymark where you take the photo as the software uses the clock to synchronize the photos with the location. Once you are ready to donwload the photos load them into JetPhoto (not into Iphoto or Aperture at this stage) and save them into a new folder. When you have the photos then plug in your GPS via a USB cable and from the MAP menu choose 'GPS Logs', 'Automatic loading' and 'Match all photos with GPS Tracks'. This goes through your photos and where it can tags them with the GPS location - a small G appears in the lower right hand corner of those photos that have been tagged. You can then view them on Google Earth by choosing that option or create a web album etc.
The above image shows the tagging page of JetPhoto - you can see which photos have been Geotagged as well as the location on the bottom left - a cool feature is that the software also finds the location in Wikipedia and this can be stored along with the Geotagging data with the photo file.
Once the photos have been tagged you need to write the GPS data to the EXIF data of the photo - this is a menu option in JetPhoto Studio. At this point you can then import the photos into iPhoto or Aperture or experiment with the JetPhoto options which include turning them into a Flash Movie (See Below), Sideshow or web gallery.
The other piece of software I played around with was DoubleTake which allows you to create panoramas. Canon provide their own software called PhotoStitch with the Canon G9 but I hadn't loaded it on my Macbook Air so I downloaded the DoubleTake software. This software is pretty easy to use and when you have taken your photos, using the panorama option on the camera, you drag and drop the images into the DoubleTake window and then roughly align them and then choose the auto-align option to get the software to fine tune the panorama. This takes a few minutes and the results seem to be reasonably good. There are options to change the geometry if you have taken the photos by hand and have changed the perspective slightly and options to change the color, saturation, contrast etc. of each of the images to get them more matched.
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