So I played around with the Google Earth integration in Picasa and it is neat. It is very useful if you don’t have a GPS or GPS data for your photos, but it does not automatically correlate the photos with any sort of GPS information.
The best I could do was load my GPS track (GPX file) and view it in Google Earth while I was tagging a photo. It doesn’t correlate the time, but at least you can match the photo with some point on the GPS track. Unless you are in the ocean with no reference points, you can probably get the point within the accuracy of the GPS signal. Unfortunately, it is still a manual process.
I hear a rumour that Google Earth 4 (which I was using) has some sort of time support for tracks but I didn’t see anything with my GPX file. It may require a track that is in a KML format. If that was the case then maybe there is a way to manually find the point in the track that correlates to a specific time (when the photo was taken). This would at least be as accurate as the automated process, but still manual.
Let’s hope the next version improve this functionality.
I’m trying to figure out a way to geotag photos taken as part of a job function. Photos are taken by several different employees using a small digital camera. The photos are downloaded to a common network folder and pertinent ones are printed out and submitted with hardcopy forms to become part of a court case. This process is a new one, and before the volume of photos becomes unmanageable, I must figure out a way to geotag these photos and possibly link them to our city GIS (also new and Oracle-based) Geographic Information System. I need the photos to be linked to a specific parcel (i.e. “property”) of land and at some point be able to click anywhere in that parcel of land in the GIS and be able to view the photos taken of that parcel/property. We have an employee who is good at writing scripts, and another who writes Visual Basic. We have access to a Recreational grade Garmin Legend GPS. We hope to obtain a Magellan Thales MobileMapper CE to assist with this effort. Any advice?
Have a look at locr (google on locr to find the download site)
This program does geotagging automatically, that is if you have a GPS in your pocket while taking the photos.
The program looks for the same timestamp in the GPS file and the photo and adds the GPS info automatically to the EXIF data.
But somehow Google Earth does not recognize the GPS fields.
But it works great within the locr program