Geo-Tagging your imagesI've been doing a ton of full scale work from a Bell 206 lately and my client is now requesting the images be geo-tagged with lat/long/altitude and saved as a .kmz file for Google Earth.
so... I did some research and purchased a Red Hen "Blue2Can" Bluetooth receiver that plugs into my Nikon D300's 10 pin aux port. It's about the size of a postage stamp and it communicates with almost any Bluetooth GPS receiver.
For a GPS receiver I bought the Wintec 201. It's small and very light. About 1 oz. It locks on to GPS signals in about 5 seconds from power up.
The combo is great.... now all my aerial shot from my D300 have GPS data in EXIF.
BUT... the great part is the Wintec 201 works with any camera even if it doesn't have a port for a Red Hen reciever. Just sync your camera time with the GPS clock and use the included software for the Wintec.
You can velcro the Wintec onto your chopper and fly as usual snapping away. When you land just import the photos into the software and they get resaved with new EXIF data to include the GPS coords.
The software will also save a Google Earth .kmz file for the photos so you can pull them up that way if you choose.
I wish I'd had this little device sooner... it's great to see all your images "push pinned" and cataloged in Google Earth.
yes... the link you show is a bit easier, but I need to also be able to view in realtime my track data on GPS on my laptop as I am flying. Some of the areas we fly and shoot are difficult to find. Having the realtime tracking data being overlayed onto Google Earth on my laptop sitting next to me is very helpful.
The Red Hen and Wintec can talk to each other while the Wintec also is connected to my laptop communicating with it. Can't do that with the device shown in your link nor will it save the track data to a file Google Earth or many others can read.
Also the Red Hen receiver is much smaller than that device. You almost don't even know it's attached to the camera
To create waypoints from google to save to a SatNav try this site www.poieditor.com
Actually www.gpsvisualizer.com works great for waypoints as well. Click on "GPSBabel" and you can convert from and to about any format you can think of. I use a Lowrance GPS which is not supported at www.poieditor.com
The diff in sites is that gpsvisualiser.com creates Map on Google from the GPS track co-ordinates from log files. You upload files to it after you have the SatNav logs to see where you went.
poieditor.com is the opposite It creates the co-ordinates and waypoint file from the google map using the mouse to select places and Zip to search them. You donwload files from it to use in the SatNav to mark places you have not yet been but want to go to or via.
Cant create a waypoint file at gpsvisualiser as far as I can tell. (EDIT, found the "Geocoder" page there to do that.) Think Ill stick with poieditor for that job.
File conversion is a pain Babel is handy, but doesnt cover all.
I got a NavMan so for track logs I have I use LogConverter on the desktop to batch convert NavMan .GPS to .OV2 tom tom. Then use POIedit to convert OV2 to NavMan CSV NavMan CSV then reads into gpsvisualiser Otherwise it chokes on the data from GPS PITA
