After my recent post on the Windows-limited Geosetter, I thought I’d take a look at the Mac-limited HoudahGeo which Richard mentioned in his comment on that post. I’d first heard about it in Lightroom designer Eric Scouten’s post Geocoding Your Photos with Lightroom and HoudahGeo. It’s certainly not as well-featured as Geosetter, and nor for all the hoo-haa on Houdah’s site about Mac design principles is it any more elegant – except for one interesting aspect:

What this screenshot shows is one of the ways you can select images for applying GPS coordinates. It’s a sort of File Open dialog box, but it’s the inclusion of Lightroom catalogues that really caught my eye.

Unlike iDVD or other Apple applications which apparently, almost magically, use the Mac operating system to display the contents of iPhoto or Aperture libraries, it looks like HoudahGeo gets the images’ locations directly from Lightroom’s SQL databases and then displays their embedded thumbnails. While it would be nice to see the Lightroom-adjusted previews (which Marc Rochkind’s LRViewer can do), that’s not a must-have requirement. It also makes you think too, that either iLife integration via the OS is a little more mechanical than they make it sound, or thoughtful designers can readily replicate it, regardless of operating system.