Geotagging with GeoTagr and iPhone (iPad) – While doing housekeeping on my blog I found an old message from last year, where the author of GeoTagr informed me about his solution recording GPS tracks and geotagging photos with an iPhone (or iPad). I apologized for being late in response and he wrote back immediately. Now I’m more than happy to show you GeoTagr. Although the app is already available for a while it is more than worth to  show how easy and fast geotagging can be or how useful the solution is while I’m not able to carry my entire or advanced equipment with me. I already wrote about my workflow on how I geotag my photos in a small series of posts. And now I will present the workflow of GeoTagr which is even powerful and suits all my needs while I’m on the way and only able to carry my “be prepared” camera and my iPhone with me.

While I’m on a business trip I commonly leave my advanced equipment at home, but my iPhone and my Canon PowerShot S95 is always ready and with me. Along with GeoTagr I have a ready to use solution on hand to geotag my photos.

This is how GeoTagr looks like “clearly arranged” and you can already imagine which steps will be needed for your workflow:

1. record 2. track administration 3. geotagging

It is really that simple and fast, as you don’t need to setup anything with the app. The only thing you should do is to align the shown time on the screen along with your camera settings. So did I with my PowerShot S95 and pushed the apps record button and went on a small test walk.

Usually I have attached my iPhone to my waist belt but this time I decided to simply wear it in my jackets front pocket to have a good GPS signal. GeoTagr also supports WiFi based and cell tower locations to localize the position.

If you have an internet connection you can follow your trip on a Google-Maps map and your track recording will be indicated by increasing numbers that present the geo locations you have been. Conveniently is that  the app keeps recording your positions while in the background so that you can still make calls, listen to music or lock your screen to save power.

When you have finished your recording you will be able to see a list of all your tracks that have been recorded so far. You can look at each track, rename, delete or export it. After your trip, simply load your images to a shared folder on your mac, let GeoTagr connect to the folder via the Geotag tab. GeoTagr needs a Wifi connection while both the iPhone and your Mac should be on the same network. (If you are using Windows you have to use a third party software of your choice to geotag your images. GeoTagr contains a ‘how to’ as well as hints about usable software at the help section). Easiest way though is a Mac if you press the Geotag tab you will see the following screen:

As you can see you are able to directly geotag photos at Dropbox, Flickr, Google+ and SmugMug, for one or two of the Windows user this might be a light at the end of the Windows tunnel.

If you choose Mac Shared Folder you will be presented a list of all shared folders that can be found at the network, simply choose the proper folder and GeoTagr starts it’s geotagging work. If you were feared that your originals would be touched, keep on breathing GeoTagr writes side car files (XMP) that contain the geo information.

That’s it! All images are geotagged and after importing the images into my Aperture I could convince myself that Aperture understands and takes care about XMP files and shows the image locations:

To be honest, the accuracy compared to my Garmin is not as close as it could be, therefore I tried to align the images timestamp a bit in precision. But the result was worse than before, which showed how good the job of GeoTagr and it’s method is.

As already described in my previous posts about geotagging, I aligned the images timestamp with Aperture to the taken photo of the GPS device (this time my iPhone and the start up screen of GeoTagr). Then I let GeoTagr do his work of geotagging again and learned that the result was a more inaccurate position than before. So this step of work was not worth the effort.

The image to the right shows the differences. At the end (at least for me) it doesn’t count to have the exact position of the photo by 100%. More likely worth is to know where the image at least has been taken, the city, the street or the area. And be noticed that even a real GPS device has an inaccuracy of about 5 meter while having clear satellite signals, taking this to account the iPhone GPS and GeoTagr has done a tremendous good job!

If the accuracy of this method suits, is a decision to be made by yourself, for me it was like fortune to have found the old message from last year and now I’m having a nice and easy solution on board to collect GPS data at any time. With minimal efforts I can geotag my photos even with my “be prepared” equipment and compared to the old days where I wrote notes on a paper about camera settings and locations it is like a children’s game to play those days.

Anyhow there is a single enhancement wish I have for GeoTagr, it would be great if you could setup the accuracy and time of taking a position to the logs.

Please find a link to the GeoTagr web site, where you can find additional information. GeoTagr is available in iTunes at the AppStore for about $ 4,99/€ 3,99.

GeoTagrTest GPX