Nikon’s geotagging GP-1 dongle now available
Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008
Nikon’s geotagging GP-1 dongle now available
There are no doubt enough unused fields in the EXIF array to put geotagging information or, maybe there are already fields used specifically for this.
No doubt these will be built into future cameras. How far in the future I’m not sure. Until then this looks interesting.
I wonder if I can add geotagging information to an image’s EXIF data array in Lightroom and if I could, I wonder what it looks like in a handheld device?
This is a nice device, but for $240 I think I’m going to pass in favor of other options.
The big plus to a device that plugs into the camera and records at time of shooting is that its a no mess solution to geotagging — nothing more to do on the computer or otherwise to get images set. For someone like me that does a lot of shooting in the ‘woods’ could be real nice.
But other geotagging devices [well, really *any* plain old GPS devices that can record tracks] could be used to sync the GPS info reliably once you get back to your computer. The advantage here is that you can reuse the GPS for any camera you have [D90 or digicam or whatever] and also those devices don’t take up a port on the d90 that could otherwise be used for the corded remote — something that can also be very useful when walking around shooting landscapes.
The nikon device is a great entry into the market, but at $240 I’d probably suggest to interested people to either price out a handheld GPS device with topo maps that can record tracks, or save some money and look at the myriad of ~$100 devices that do nothing but record GPS tracks [I use an older Sony GPS-CS1 with soem success]
As for geotagging inside of Lightroom, I typically sync EXIF with GPS before importing into LR [avoiding any metadata syncing issues between the original EXIF and LR additions], but I do know there are a few LR plugins out there to tag images already in LR. Not too long ago I wrote up a blog post on syncing geocoded tracks from that Sony or a cell phone like the Nokia N95 and matching them with your photos.
Thanks for the link to the blog post Chris, I should have remembered that you were both into this stuff AND a Nikon user.
yup yup… and I’m a recent migrant to the D90 so this info is particularly interesting to me, and its nice to know the GPS is finally starting to get out there and is an option if I need to look for a different setup someday.
Ultimately, I can’t wait for all cameras to have GPS built in and make it another thing you don’t have to worry about [I always get surprised when i shoot with my digicam and have to rotate images 90 degrees after importing! Its the little things that really count], but for now I’m ok with the small extra step in my workflow as a less costly alternative.