Geotagging photos

Before you start

Fix the date and time in your camera. If you don't, you will have to specify an offset when you do the tagging.

Set your GPS logger to a high update rate. For example, have it log once per 5 seconds. When you are done, turn it back down. I used a Garmin GPSMap 62SC on my last field trip.

In the field

You have the option now to simply shoot pictures and then use the track log as your GPS data. I like to shoot a few pictures and set waypoints for them so that I have more confidence that the alignment is good.

I tag all the pictures using the track log then see if the photo locations line up with the collected waypoints. Otherwise I might need to adjust the time offset and try tagging again.

Geotagging

Download the Current.GPX file and the waypoint file from the GPS.

I want to use Digikam to manage my photo collection from my Mac but I am building it now and it's not ready yet. I used it a few years ago on Linux and am convinced it's the best available software to manage my photo collection.

In the meantime I am using QGIS a lot these days too so I am going to use it to geotag.

The plugin "Geotag and import photos" is useless to me because it only puts one location in a bunch of photos, does not care about timestamps. To install it I followed instructions here: http://hub.qgis.org/projects/geotagphotos/wiki I had to install exiftool on the Mac with "brew install exiftool", which puts the executable in /usr/local/bin.