Found in Cyberspace

After yesterday's unpleasant little moan about the difficulties of geotagging, cyberspace has made everything more or less right again. First off, Jeffrey Early, author of GPSPhotoLinker, took the time to deal with my queries and suggest strongly that I complain to iView. I will, but now that they are owned by Microsoft I'm not all that optimistic.

I had also posted a comment at High Earth Orbit, which has lots of good info about geotagging, in response to a post about how to geotag Flickr photos “the right way”. Andrew Turner, the author, was kind enough to reply, pointing me to PictureSync, an uploader that supports many image sharing web sites beyond Flickr. I downloaded 1.5, but that kept giving me an error, so I tried the 1.6 beta and that worked like a charm. I uploaded one test image (another Plumeria, of course), all the tags got through, and it appeared on my map automagically.

Andrew also had an interesting suggestion for GPSPhotolinker, to make it more usable when one does not have a GPS machine to supply a track:

What I would like is if GPSPL allowed me to set & store locations and then later assign those locations - or a simple interface to build a "fake" track file (I type in where I was at what times, from calendar, memory, tickets, etc) that is then used.

That seems like a great idea, although there are actually lots of other tools out there that will allow you to add geographic information to a photo in other ways. Semaflickr is one of the more interesting ones, although it only works for photos already on Flickr and only uses Flickr's very non-standard geotags. And maloXP suggested a bookmarklet that claims to make geotagging even easier within Flickr; I have not needed to try that, but it is good to know it exists.

So it seems like I'm all set. And I am definitely abandoning Fickr Uploadr in favour of PictureSync. You should too.