I picked up the tip from Joseph on TWiP about using GeoTagr. It was exactly what I was looking for since Canon is so tardy in embracing GPS tagging.
Of course, when I used it according to the instructions it was fine. But it disturbed my workflow because I now had to manually copy all my photos to a shared folder so GeoTagr could do its magic. Then it was back to Aperture for the import but now from the shared folder. It works but I thought the workflow was now clumsy.
So I tried importing the track into Places (in Aperture) and dragging the photos on to it. I have done this before (in either iPhoto or Aperture, can't remember which) using a track from my Garmin Edge 305. It worked just fine from memory. However, this gave a surprising and disappointing result with Aperture/GeoTagr.
It seems that wherever you drop the photos on the track becomes the start point for all the photos selected. So if the track started at 0900 and your first photo was at 0900 also, but you dropped the selection on the track at the 0930 position then all the photos will be positioned relative to 0930. That is not good and there should be no reason for it. Both the track and the photos are time-stamped so they should automatically align.
I hope my description is clear. Does anybody have an explanation and/or fix for this behavior? Or have I just totally got it wrong - that would be the easiest to cure of course!
Thanks in advance,
Brian.
Brian,
It’s working by design, and it has nothing to do with the GeotTgr log — it works that way with any track.
I agree that there should be an option to auto-align when you know that your camera was set correctly. But this feature is there precisely so that your camera doesn’t have to be set correctly. All you need to do is line up the photo with a known location, and everything slips into place.
@PhotoJoseph
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Thanks for the quick response Joseph. It is a pity they didn’t allow for the automatic alignment option. It seems like a no-brainer. I just assumed it would work like that and if I had a time offset error I would have to resolve that first using the ‘Metadata>Adjust Date and Time’ function.
Anyway, to clarify the process further… Say I have a selection of photos taken over several hours and a corresponding track loaded. Do I position my drop to be correct for the first photo in the selection and the rest will align? Or does it align based on the photo I position the pointer on for the drag and drop?
Cheers,
Brian.
Brian,
Position the drop of any photo to the accurate location. If you know that your time was set accurately, then all you need to do is drag along the line until the time difference reads zero. Keep in mind that if you took lots of photos while standing in one spot, it could be tricky to find that part of the line since they tend to clump up. Zoom way in and be as accurate as you can.
Once you drop one photo (any photo), Aperture will ask if you want to match the rest up accordingly.
@PhotoJoseph
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Thanks for the detailed description Joseph. BTW, I have also dropped a feedback note to the Aperture team under the ‘Design/Ease of Use’ category.
Cheers,
Brian.
Some Aperture-Versions ago there was a plug-in that did the trick (assign a whole bunch of photos to the corresponding geo locations based on an imported track). Unfortunately, the guys who had programmed this plug-in (forgot the actual name, sorry) decided to discontinue its support.
Placing a few (20 say) photos onto a track manually by moving around until the time diff is zero might be viable, but not a a bigger number.
What I currently do is: use a separate tool to add the geo tags to the photos. There are quite a few around, my current choice is MyTracks (mytracks4mac.com), there’s also an iOS companion that can do the logging. You can either
mytracks4mac.com has detailed instructions how to do it both ways (or in iPhoto, if you’re using that too).
I’d rather have an Aperture plug-in that does everything from within, but for me, this is much more suitable work-around that manually adjust the time diff of each of some 100s of photos as described earlier in this thread…
Cheers,
Marc
The old plugin might have been Maperture, by Ubermind. (Nowadays the link goes to Deloitte.)
“Combining the power of Aperture and Google Maps (the mapping engine you know and love), Maperture is a powerful, new edit plug-in that makes geotagging your photos a snap. Add or update global positioning system (GPS) data to your digital photos.”
Bonnie Bouman
http://365project.org/bonniebouman/365
I use Eye-Fi cards to get the GPS automatically. Downsides: There’s an extra step with those too – files have to go through the Eye-fi Center app process and connect to their server in order to get the location marker, before importing them into Aperture. Worse, I’ve never been able to get Eye-fi to work with RAW files, only JPG. Bizarrely, there is very little (and very bad) Support/Help information on the topic. They seem to think the great feature is the wireless transfer of the photos. I don’t care about that, I care about the location!
Anyway. It works for the Point & Shoot camera, but not the SLR (on which I shoot .raw).
Bonnie Bouman
http://365project.org/bonniebouman/365