The good folks at Camera Bits
This morning I spent over two hours searching for the name of a creek along the Rappahnock river that I had photographed in the good old pre-GPS days and on Fuji Veliva.
If you are shooting with a Nikon camera, it is pretty easy to embed your GPS data into the NEF files. With the Canon camera it takes a couple of extra steps and you need to pony up $900.00 for the 5D Mark II wireless transmitter or $750 for the WFT-E2A for the 1Ds III. Either way, you need to connect your GPS to your camera while shooting. Not a problem on the ground, a bit of a problem in the backseat of a cramped Hughes 500 that is shared with all of my kit, my Ken-Lab KS-6 gyro plus safety gear and harnesses.
Many of the pilots I fly with keep a GPS track log of the flight to prove what our altitudes and positions were. I use the GPS data to find out my location if I see something of interest.
Blending the GPS log with the RAW data was difficult and many programs would only sync jpegs and not raw files.
After my grand search this morning..which was successful…I called the good folks at Camera Bits, the authors of the must-have import-caption-keyword software, Photo Mechanic.
Bob from their customer support division called me this afternoon and after downloading the newest version, we got to work. Bob guided me through changing the IPTC/XMP preferences to an XMP workflow instead of an IPTC workflow. PM v4.6 does not add the GPS info to the Exif section so other applications will not find the coordinates. 4.6.1 will. You can import a GPS tracklog to a slection of images and it will sync them together by writing the code so that the information is visible in web galleries or exported files. It takes a little bit of work but it is well worth it.
Currently PM supports two types of track logs and hopefully will support others int he future. The good news is GPS Babble is a shareware program that converts tracklogs into the gpx format. A feature that impressed me was the GPS sync with Google maps. You can view a map of the area where the photographed was shot and adjust the information in your files if needed.
A lot of people talk about photo management programs like LR, Aperture, C1 and DXO. Photo Mechanic is different than the others. It is not a raw converter, or catalog program, it does not try to do everything for everyone. What it does do is excel at importing your file in a logical way that allows you to write captions, gps data, keywords, locations and many other variables into your raw files or as a sidecar. This data can then carry forward into other programs. It is fast, simple, easy to use and their customer support is stellar.
The image above is a screen grab of aerials I shot over Smith Island in the Chesapeake Bay showing the date, time and GPS data along with file name. My pilot sent me the tracklog today as a test and everything synced properly. The key is to make sure that the GPS unit plus cameras are showing the correct time. I use GMT as my standard. I can adjust in Photo Mechanic is needed.
Photo Mechanic – http://www.camerabits.com
GPS Babel – http://www.gpsbabel.org
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