Geotagging photos on the Mac

In the comments of a previous post, Marion asked:

How do your geotag them? Is it by dragging them to the map in Flickr or do you have a more automatic or precise way to do it? I’ve thought of using waypoints on my GPS and manually entering them but i’m wondering if I am making it too hard.

Frankly, most of the time I use Flickr Organizr and drag things onto the map. I’m trying to break that habit, because interface between flickr and my Mac is one-way; it’s an uploading system, not a syncing system, so changes made on the flickr side aren’t brought back to the photo library on my mac. I wish, but what the heck.

There is a nice mac tool called Geotagger, which interfaces to Google Earth. You install Google Earth, download Geotagger, and you’re ready to go. To add Geotag info to photos, fire up Google Earth and center the map on the location you want to tag with, then take the photos and drop them on Geotagger. To make it easy, I just leave Geotagger in the dock — it doesn’t have a GUI, it’s all drag and drop.

It can take a little practice to center things to your satisfaction, and I found Geotagger 1.2 a bit slow on large sets of photos, but 2.0 is out and performance was a major focus from the release notes. As far as your workflow, Geotagging is something you need to do early in the process to the RAW fiels, and then if you don’t strip EXIF it’ll carry into any follow-up files you create such as a JPEG for flickr.

Works nicely and reliably. I’d be happier if it was more tightly integrated into Bridge. there is a third party plug-in for Lightroom that does Geotagging, but I haven’t used Lightroom so Ic an’t tell you how well it works. Maperture is a plug-in for Aperture Geotagging, but since I don’t use Aperture any more, I haven’t tried it. Bridge users seem to be out of luck, a good hint to upgrade my workflow to Lightroom (the whole Lightroom vs. Aperture debate is for later…).

What about the hardware GPS beasts? Derrick Story’s been looking at these devices over at Digital Story. My feeling? I don’t need that much accuracy that often, and it’s one more gadget to worry about, one more set of processes for the workflow, and it just seems to be more hassle than I care for. Not to mention needing to be careful about keeping the camera clock accurate. For me, adding that data in later is good enough for me, and there are times (such as detailed geotag info to my house or my mom’s house or to friend’s house) that I’d jsut as soon not have leak because I forgot to not include it…

So if you’re on a mac, try Geotagger. It works for me, and it’s convenient enough that I’ve started getting in the habit of using it instead of doing it on flickr (although I haven’t completely made it a habit yet).

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