Geotagging Photos – My Workflow – Part 3. Today I will show you the last steps on my workflow how I geo tag my photos. I make use of HoudahGeo rather than directly in Aperture as I found geotagging in Aperture a bit tricky. Within HoudahGeo it seems to me that I have more control over what I’m doing. Assuming you have followed my little tutorial, you should now have aligned your photos to the correct time stamp and downloaded the GPS track log files.

Now it is time to open HoudahGeo

and to add images to the HoudahGeo project. As you will see HoudahGeo has a simple three step workflow to geo tag the photos.

When adding photos to HoudahGeo, a dialog appear to align the time stamp of the photos you are importing. We did this already in Aperture so you can leave all to the default setting (which should reflect the time zone of your GPS tracks and photos). I found it a bit to complicate here to calculate the time difference in seconds and love the easy way in Aperture like I described in my last post.

Photos that do not have any geo information will be displayed in red and the position fields are left empty. At step 2 it’s time to import the track logs from your GPS or the location where you have stored the track files.

HoudahGeo will start to import the track log and geo tag the photos automatically. The Track Inspector shows the time frame of each log, in other words the first and last position (in time) of the log file is shown here. I only loaded one track and as you can see all photos that are not within the time frame kept untagged. You can add more logs if available and geo tag the rest of the undone photos.

Having all set the next step is to bring the geo data into the EXIF of the photos.

Your recorded GPS tracks may have additional data and you can choose for those at the “Write” section after clicking the Write to EXIF button. I simply leave all checked here even if the data would be unavailable or not set within HoudahGeo. When HoudahGeo is done, I return to Aperture and when I didn’t unmarked my selection here I can directly do the refresh otherwise I first have to reselect all photos that I have recently aligned with the GPS time.

With the photos selected in Aperture, open the Metadata dialog and choose “Update from Masters” there is no dialog appearing and Aperture directly start working. After that you can see the EXIF data of your photos in their EXIF data:

That’s it! You are done.

This is just my way how I geo tag my photos with the equipment that I have. Again the workflow can easily taken over to other equipment and software. Maybe you already have a build in GPS in your camera or you do not geo tag at all? Do you geo tag your photos and if you do, how is your workflow looking?