If you are a Lightroom 4 user, and own a smart phone, you can fairly easily tag your photos with GPS coordinates.
The basic idea is to use your smartphone’s GPS capability (and a tracker app), to track where you are while taking photos. Later, you export that GPS track to your computer, and import the track into Lightroom 4. After a couple more clicks, you have geo-tagged photos!
I will detail the steps for accomplishing this.
- Get a GPS tracking app for your smartphone.
I have an android phone, and am using “Geotag Photos Pro”. This app costs a few dollars and is also available for the i-Phone. There are other apps, some of them free that should be able to do the job. You want an app that can export your GPS track locations in a .GPX file format.
One free app for the i-phone that I have heard works well is MotionX GPS.
- Synchronize the clocks on your smartphone and camera.
Your camera and phone need to be set to the same timezone, date, and time. Geotag Photos Pro has a screen for this on the settings tab:
(phone screenshot)
- Start the GPS tracker on your smart phone.
When you are ready to start taking photos, first start the GPS tracker app on your phone and hit the record button. Geotag Photos Pro has you create a “trip” first, then start recording. Other apps may be slightly different.
(phone screenshot)
After you have started recording, keep your phone with you so it will track your location.
- Take pics
- When done with your photo shoot, stop the GPS tracker
Hit Stop on the GPS tracker app on your phone.
- Export the GPS track to a .GPX file.
Different apps may have different ways to do this, but the end result is you want to get a .gpx file to the computer where you run Lightroom. For Geotag Photos Pro, there is an e-mail GPX option:
(phone screenshot)
- From Lightroom 4: Import your photos as normal.
- Go to the Maps module. Notice in the metadata panel, the GPS information is blank:
- Click on the import track icon (squiggly line at the bottom of the map), and pick “Load Tracklog”
- Navigate to where the .gpx file is located on your computer and select it.
Track will appear on the map
- Select all the imported photos (ctrl-a), then click on the squiggly line again and choose “Auto Tag xx Selected Photos”
- At this point all the photos will be tagged with GPS data, and will show up on the map similar to below screenshot. Small rectangular “ballons” appear on the map at the location the photo was taken. The number inside the ballon indicates how many photos were taken at that spot. You can hover over the number to see a small thumbnail of the photo taken there. If you click on the number it selects those photos in the lightroom filmstrip. There are ways to filter by location in lightroom that I am still learning.
- Now if you select one photo and take a look at the metadata panel, you will see the GPS and location data is filled in:
- And now all the photos show a location bubble icon on the thumbnail in any of the modules:
If you click this it will take you to the location on the map where that photo was taken (If you have an active internet connection).
Enjoy Geo-Tagging your Photos,
Paul
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The photo below is from a recent trip to Vermont for cousin Colleen's wedding. This is a historic dairy barn just outside of Stowe, VT.
It is a 3-exposure HDR image processed with Photomatix. I liked the lens flare, so did not attempt to remove it.
