GPS Tagging of Photos - Evaluation of Flickr, ...

I rode my bicycle around the lake of Zug and used the occasion to try out GPS tagging (this means to add GPS-Information to photos, so they can easily be shown on Maps). I wanted to visualize my trip and my photos I had taken on that trip, so I evaluated websites like flickr, to see, how well the support geotagging. The result is this article, which will hopefully help you to select the best website, if you want to do some geotagging.

This article can be divided into 4 sections:
1. GPS tagging - a tutorial - What do you need to do GPS tagging?
2. Combination of GPS-Track-Data and Photos - How to visualize the photos on the track of your trip.
3. Uploading the pictures - which provider to choose? - Which photo-website provides the best support for geotagging?
4. Links for GPS tagging - some references

1. GPS tagging - a tutorial

What you need

• a photo camera - in my case the cell phone Sony Ericsson K800i
• a gps receiver (preferably built-in into the camera) - in my case the Garmin Etrex Vista

Make sure the two devices have the same date and time set up. This is crucial for matching the photos with the GPS-information afterwards.

How to put the GPS data into the photo's EXIF data

I used the GPSPhotoLinker (Mac only) to get the track-Data from the Garmin and to tag the photos.
If you use Windows, you can search for a GPS/geotagging-tool on Versiontracker. A good freeware could be GeoSetter, but I haven't tested it yet, and don't know if it supports batch geotagging. If you tested it, please leave a comment.
To get the track-data from the Garmin and translate it into GPX, you can use GPS Babel.

2. Combination of GPS-Track-Data and Photos

Google Earth

With Picasa Web Albums it's easy to mash up tracks and photos. Just open the track-file. Then right-click on the track and choose "Add-->Network-link". Enter the link to the KML-File of Picasa Web Albums (to be found under the link "View in Google Earth"). For my trip, that looks like this: Google Earth-file for the bicycle-tour.
Now you can walk through every photo by selecting "Tools-->Play Tour".
For those of you, who don't want to startup Google Earth, a preview is shown on the right, and there is also a possibility to directly show your KMZ-file in Google Maps! (Instructions here) Have a look at my KMZ-file in Google Maps.

In Flickr, there is also an integration into Google Earth, but nor for each album, only for all the photos of an user. At the end of the user's page there's a KML-Link, that you can add as a network link in Google Earth. I also included a network-link to flickr in another KMZ-file, but strangely not all the photos from flickr are included...

Via Ferrata

Via-Ferrata (german) is very good for uploading track-info. Beside showing track on a Google Map, they calculate different stuff like average speed and provide a visualization of the elevation-profile. It should also be possible to upload images, which are directly inserted on the Google Map, unfortunately that didn't work. (Possibly because the time on the track-file is 2h behind the time of the Garmin etrex vista)

Google Maps

1. Combine the track-data and the photos in Google Earth like I described here
2. Upload the KMZ-File on a server. If you don't have your own webspace, use a hoster like Mediafire for example.
3. Create a Google Map-Link to that file: http://maps.google.com/?q=<link_to_your_kmz_file>&t=h (the variable t at the end defines the type of the map. (h= hybrid, k= satellite, no parameter t = normal map)
4. You're done

Thanks to Stacy and Brian for pointing that out.

For including only the Track on a Google Map, GPS Visualizer is very convenient. Here is an example:

3. Uploading the pictures - which provider to choose?

Picasa Web Albums:

Link to my pictures
Link to the Google Map for the album

Advantages:

• Good integration with google maps. For every album, a small google map is showed, where the location of the images can be seen
• It's possible to merge gps-tracks and image-locations in a Google-Earth file (KMZ-file)

Drawbacks:

• No easy multiple upload per web interface, iPhoto-Plugin and Uploader-Program needed to upload a lot of photos.
• if you upload images by "Picasa Web Albums Uploader" and scale the images for faster transfer, the GPS-Data is deleted from the EXIF-Metadata, so be sure to use the option "Actual Size (slowest upload)"

Possible improvements:

• upload of gpx-tracks, to match tracks with photos
• first you have to explicitly allow picasa to use the gps-information inside the EXIF-data of the images. You have to go to "Settings" and then activate "Use Exif location information." Normally, as soon as Picasa discovers images with location tags, it will ask you if you want to enable this function.

Flickr:

Photo set on flickr
Photo set visualized on a map

Advantages:

• Direct upload of multiple photos via web interface.
• Comfortable tagging and commenting of photos.

Drawbacks:

• Getting a map for photos is not an obvious thing. You have to append /url/ to the end of the current url to get a map of a user, a set, or a photo. Here is an example of such a url, to see my photos of the bicycle-trip on a map
• GPS-tagged photos aren't put on the map by standard. The GPS data needs to be in the flickr-tags (geo:lat=, geo:long= and "geotagged"). At least, you don't have to do that manually, you can automatically let flickr generate those tags from the EXIF-GPS-Data. You can set this in your account-settings in the privacy-tab under "Import EXIF location data". However this only works for new photos you upload. If you already have uploaded photos with geo-data in their EXIF, I suggest, you use this little program called GeoReTagr to add the flickr geo tags

PS. There are 3rd-party-websites, that provide mashups of flickr and maps. Mappr was unreachable during this evaluation, and loc.alize.us didn't return pictures for a user-dependent search.

Panoramio:

Photos. I only uploaded some for testing purposes.

Advantages:

• Gives you the opportunity to make your pictures visible for everyone in Google Earth.

Drawbacks:

• absolutely no possibility to upload multiple photos in one click. Every photo has to be uploaded one-by-one.
• no possibility to arrange photos into albums, therefore there's only a Google Map for each of the photos.

Conclusion

Picasa Web Albums is the best choice to upload gps tagged pictures, because maps are directly integrated into the album, you don't have to use a 3rd-party website. Furthermore, you can easily combine track data and images in Google Earth and Google Maps.

4. Links for GPS tagging

GPS Visualizer - Upload a GPS-datafile and get visualizations in Google Earth, Google Maps or as image-files.
For Mac: GPSPhotoLinker - import GPS-Tracks from Garmin-device as GPX-file and insert that GPX-data into photos
For PC: GPS Babel - translate GPS-tracks from Garmin-devices into GPX-files
Google Earth Blog - I've got some information about Google Earth tagging from there