Geotagging

The GPS on my AW100 is a disappointment, but that isn’t all I have to help me with geotagging. The Thrive comes with built-in GPS. More importantly, it doesn’t feel like they threw in a low-quality GPS for the sake of saying that they had it. I am definitely pleased, especially when compared with the AW100.
First of all, let me point out that I have a few self-imposed precautions. I do not use GPS at home or while connected to the internet. I don’t want to advertise where I live or even where I am. When I go for walks with my Thrive, I wait until I get to Chambers Creek Properties (or wherever it is that I’m walking) before I activate the GPS. I also turn off the GPS while I’m still there. I’m not saying that this will keep undesirables from ever finding me, but it’s a much better policy than handing out the information.

I don’t want to carry around my Thrive in my hands while I’m taking pictures, so I stick it in a backpack. I usually keep my DSLR and Thrive at home when it rains, but there are s few exceptions. In a backpack during the rain, the Thrive does miss a little. Compared to my alternative, it still does an incredible job.

I have also found that trees can mess with the GPS a little (although the backpack and case might make things worse than if I kept the Thrive out in the open). Logs in the canyon area of the park don’t match uphill and downhill. Since I’m on the same trail both directions, this indicates errors in the log.

One annoying quirk is that the log is always recording the wrong date. Before I can tag my pictures, I have to open the file in notepad and do a find and replace. I have to tell it to replace tomorrow with today.

As for the actual tagging, it took me a little time to figure out how to handle it. The best approach that I found was to use the software that shipped with the Nikon AW100, ViewNX 2, and use their log matching feature. Sometimes, it will fail on a small number of pictures. If that happens, I have to look for the pictures that weren’t tagged, select them, and repeat the process. I have never needed more than that second pass. That is unless you count failed attempts because I forgot to correct the date in the GPS log.

I have had some problems with Flickr. It appears that they don’t read the location when you upload files. I have tried this two different ways and visited a page for importing those tags without any luck. To make things worse, most of my tools don’t allow me to actually copy the coordinates. To tag files in Flickr, I click on a link in Lightroom to show the location on Google maps, copy the coordinates once the page loads, open the Flickr version of the file for editing, select the location tab, past the coordinates in both latitude and longitude, and delete the extra information in each of those two fields.

As a general guideline, any DSLR pictures taken from January 8, 2012 and later should be properly geotagged (although my GPS had cut at at Pt. Defiance, causing me to tag the general area). Anything before will be wild guesses. Some older pictures will only reflect a park rather than even a reasonable guess about the shooting location. Some pictures taken with my AW100 could also be geotagged properly. Some might actually use the built-in GPS. Others might be a quick grab for a secondary (wider angle) camera when I’m using my wildlife lens on my DSLR. In most cases, however, geotagged pictures with this camera should be viewed as unreliable.

I have uploaded a couple of the Thrive GPS logs to my SkyDrive account if anyone wants to see the performance for themselves. You can load the log into any of a number of programs such as Google Earth if you would like to see the track. Just be warned, SkyDrive currently seems to believe in linking more to a folder rather than a file (It didn’t use to be like that), so both links will act similar. The only real difference is which file is checked.

Here’s the first (January 28, 2012):

Check out the Canyon toward the south, and you will see how the track is thrown off when surrounded by trees.
Here’s the second log (February 20, 2012):

This was during the rain. The lines are a little more jagged, and the GPS didn’t register the end of the Bridge to the Beach (West side) properly. I can assure you that I did not jump into the Puget Sound.
While I’m at it, I should probably share my first properly geotagged image: