Today I show you how I align the time stamp of my photos to the time stamp of my GPS device. I use Aperture here because this is the tool I use to import my photos to my external hard disk. It is also possible to store your masters within the Aperture library as HoudahGeo is capable to deal with the masters in the library. But I prefer to store my masters externally and I found that the process is a bit faster this way.
After I set up my GPS and went for taking photos. I come back to my iMac and start to import my photos to Aperture as usual.
When all my photos are in place, I mark all photos of the session and I make sure that within my marked photos the one that shows the GPS with the time is the highlighted one, to achieve this the GPS photo is the last one I mark. The highlighted photo has a thicker frame than the other marked ones.
Now it is time to align the time code of my photos with the photo of the GPS device. Choose from the top menu “Metadata” then “Adjust Date and Time…”
You will get something like the following dialog:
The time that the photo has is the “Original” time marked with the yellow box. The time the GPS had at this time is marked with the green box on the left. Now we adjust the time to exactly the same time of the GPS to the “Adjusted” box on the right. Make sure you checked “Also change master files” otherwise the results when geotagging the photos will deliver false values. Click Adjust and Aperture is doing all the work for you.
When Aperture has finished this job you can check the result by reopening the “Adjust Date and Time…” dialog and you will see the aligned time stamp.
At the last post I told you that I may take another photo of my GPS showing the exact time later or at the end of my hike or shooting. At this step you can go to this photo, highlight it and reopen the “Adjust Date and Time…” dialog and compare if the “Original” and “Adjusted” time is the same. By now I didn’t had any difference so far.
The next step is to import and download the GPX log files from your GPS device to your Computer. At least I’m doing so, rather to leave my logged tracks on the GPS for ever. Next to geo tagging photos, you can do a lot more things with those logs. HoudahGeo is the next tool I use rather than using Aperture to geo tag the photos, beyond that HoudahGeo can do the work of downloading and importing of the GPX track files for you when you have done the proper set up here. Commonly I simply copy the GPX files by hand to the location I will store and backup the logs for the shooting. I found that geo tagging within Aperture is a bit tricky and I love to have more control over the things here on my own. After the work with HoudahGeo I will come back to Aperture and do a simple META refresh with the photos.
In the next part of my tutorial I will show you how to geo tag with HoudahGeo and how to do the refresh within Aperture.
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