GPSPhotoLinker How-To: Manually Put GPS Coordinates Into Photos

Jeffrey Early hasn't had a chance to release the new version of GPSPhotoLinker this week (version 1.1), but he was kind enough to send me a beta copy of it. I played around with it a bit and figured out how to manually put GPS coordinates into photos.

1. Get the GPS coordinates of the location where the picture was taken. If you know the address, you can use MultiMap.com or Melissa Data to get the GPS coordinates of the address.
2. Make a new text file containing the following text:

   <gpx><wpt lat="x" lon="y"></wpt></gpx>

   Replace x with your latitude and y with your longitude. Save the file.
3. Change the ending of the text file from .txt to .gpx.
4. Open GPSPhotoLinker 1.1.
5. Load the picture whose coordinates you entered into the .gpx file by clicking the Load images... button.
6. Then load the GPX file by clicking the Load GPX files... button.
7. Click on the picture you loaded.
8. Click on the .gpx file.
9. Press the Save to photo button.

And that's all it takes. Not exactly the most graceful workaround to get GPX coordinates into a photo, but it's the best I've been able to come up with so far. If anyone comes up with anything better, I'd love to hear it. I've yet to explore how to do this with multiple photos and will post it up here as soon as I do.

Here's a few suggestions I've got for Jeff, some of which I've already shared with him. These all contemplate a situation in which you have not been able to accurately record your GPS coordinates and thus need to use some other reference to figure out what they were and later put them into the photo. For each of the below input suggestions, batch change is needed to make it easy to work with.

Allow input of GPS coordinates into photos manually
You should be able to edit the coordinates just as you would any other data field, rather than this round-about way for which the program was admittedly not designed.

Allow input of GPS coordinates into photos by address
Not sure if Melissa Data could be tapped for this, but it would make things quite easy. This opens the further idea of integrating Address Book at some point (e.g., use one of the addresses of a contact to determine GPS coordinates).

Allow input of GPS coordinates into photos by city name
While this would not provide the accuracy of more specific coordinates, it would be good for that trip you took through Europe where you're not sure exactly where the pics were taken.

Allow input of GPS coordinates into photos by clicking on a map
There are obviously plenty of times when there's not gonna be an address for where you are, but you can find yourself on a map. Clicking on a map would serve beautifully to solve the problem when more accurate coordinates are not available.

Allow input of GPS coordinates into photos by tab-delineated text
If you've got a ton of photos to convert, you could just write out the coordinates into a text file with a simple pattern of latitude, tab, longitude, tab, altitude, return, for each point.

Jeff is definitely on to something here, and I would argue that he's ahead of his time with this program. I'm looking forward to watching GPSPhotoLinker develop, and hopefully to watch digital cameras catch up with this idea.