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www.waypoints.de<br />

www.swopnet.com/waypoints<br />

www.travelbygps.com<br />

www.pickatrail.com<br />

Adding GPS Information to Digital Photos<br />

Chapter 8 — GPS <strong>Data</strong><br />

Hooking your digital camera to your GPS is going to cost you a lot of money and it can only<br />

be done with certain combinations of cameras and GPS units. For example, you can find kits to<br />

connect Kodak digital cameras, such as the DC 260, to a GPS receiver, but the adapter alone,<br />

excluding the camera and GPS receiver, costs over $300. A cheaper way to do this is to add<br />

GPS information to your digital photos on your PC.<br />

The process is simple — after you have taken a picture at a location, use your GPS to create a<br />

waypoint at that spot. This will store the coordinates along with data and time information,<br />

and then you can add the waypoint information to the image file afterwards.<br />

In order to do this, you need special software — called RoboGEO (see Figure 8-38).<br />

RoboGEO is shareware software; it currently costs $22.95, but you can download an evaluation<br />

(trial) version from www.robogeo.com.<br />

RoboGEO takes the information from waypoints you specify on your GPS and enables you to<br />

add the waypoint information to the EXIF information on the digital photo.<br />

EXIF stands for Exchangeable Image File Format. This data storage format allows for the<br />

storage of non-image data (such as date, time, camera settings, and, in this case, latitude and<br />

longitude) within the actual image file. Virtually all modern digital cameras produce images that<br />

can store EXIF information within the file (usually only for JPG/JPEG format). This means<br />

that you don’t have to add text overlays to your image that show the data. Instead, the data is<br />

stored in such as way that it can be viewed using Windows XP or another digital photograph<br />

application that uses the EXIF standard. An excellent application for viewing EXIF information<br />

is Exifer for Windows (www.friedemann-schmidt.com/software/exifer). This is a<br />

postcardware application (the only payment that the author asks for is a postcard) that enables<br />

you to view and edit this information.<br />

FIGURE 8-38: RoboGEO<br />

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