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.

For a while I’ve been playing around with GPS and geotagging. Without a real need, I’ve been happy just nibbling at it from various directions but for some reason in Italy I seemed to find time to try a bit of everything.

I’ve a little Garmin GPS unit that connects directly to the camera. After the wedding in Positano, I had time to look around the Amalfi coast and found a lovely location called Fiordo di Furore. Unfortunately the “fiordo” in its name means it’s a deep cove that’s well-sheltered from passing satellites. My other main location was Paestum with its Greek temples. Being in the midst of a mosquito-infested swamp (you should see my legs) it was much easier to gain a GPS signal and all should have been perfect for recording the coordinates directly into the image. But – and probably because it’s a very basic unit – the signal kept dropping. I really couldn’t be bothered checking the little GPS indicator on the camera each time I wanted to take a shot, and after a while I just disconnected it. So as usual I was left with a mixture of a few geotagged and many more untagged images.

Sure, I know I could always leave the GPS unit on as I wander around (and carry extra batteries), or I could capture various waypoints or whatever they’re called. With something to connect the GPS to the computer, I could download the tracklog, and use something like ImageIngester to merge the log data into the NEFs or DNGs. I’m sure this process would work, but it seems more trouble than it’s worth. So last week I hacked a tracklog in TextEdit, using the data recorded on a few Paestum frames, and applied it with ImageIngester. That worked, but satisfied my curiosity rather too easily.

What else have I tried? Well, over the weekend I also wrote a script for Bridge but found Adobe protects the EXIF fields – sensibly enough. I could have modified it to post coordinates to existing IPTC fields, but I don’t really agree in principle with hijacking and abusing fields. Another alternative was to modify the script to write GPS data to my own private tags until such time as there’s an agreed place for manual GPS entries, when I could probably copy the data over. But for now only Bridge, Photoshop, and Extensis Portfolio would have been able to read those tags – not Lightroom, Aperture, iView etc. And any of these methods would mean entering the GPS data manually. That was also the downfall of making yet another doomed effort at understanding the very thorough documentation behind Exiftool.

This seems so typical of my efforts with geotagging. I don’t find it worthwhile enough to record GPS automatically, or at least consistently, but adding the information afterwards, which should work better for me, has also seemed too half baked (Expression Media 2′s dragging and dropping onto a Virtual Earth map, which seemed so promising, is more a developer’s ugly proof of concept than a polished feature fit for release) or too Heath Robinson like Exiftool. But it was after I got home yesterday when I was trying to make sense of Exiftool that I noticed a link to a program that a few people have recommended – Geosetter.

Whoo. It’s rather good:

• A Google Earth window helps you identify where pictures were taken, and a button then applies the GPS coordinates to the image screenshot here.
• A particularly well-done feature is that you can choose by individual file type how Geosetter writes the information, so for raw files you can choose to write into the image itself or into a sidecar file, as I prefer, while for DNG I chose to write the data directly into the file.
• The other feature I really liked was Geosetter’s ability to get the location information from Google and fill in the IPTC fields, and it’s possible to copy those fields into the keywords too.

That done, you can drag images into Lightroom to initiate its import process or use Library’s Metadata > Read Metadata from File to update existing images.

But I feel I’ve only scratched the surface of what looks like a really good program – and all the more reason to install Windows on my Mac laptop.

What you’re seeing here has been squeezed for this screenshot – you can resize the thumbnail grid (middle left), the preview image (bottom left), and the map. The two temples shown in the picture are visible in the satellite image, and I’ve been lazy by saving the details as a favourite (the star) which applies to images shot within 250 metres (the blue circle).

By the way, in case this post makes you think I my time in Italy was only photos and metadata…. Paestum has its trashy tourist shops, but at the southern end of the map is a dairy farm La Fattoria del Casaro. They make mozzarella from their own buffalo herd and do lunch using products grown on the farm. Not being a meat eater, I didn’t try the salamis but I did try their scamorza, smoked mozzarella, which they sear and serve with olive oil and basil. It was everything I love about Italy – I even got to thank the buffaloes in person.