Guide to Geocaching and GPS Photography Ver. 1.1
I’ll try to create a simple guide on how to geotag your photos. This way you can
- Create map to follow on your pocket pc
- record your path
- create neat maps with embedded photos on them. Example here: http://picasaweb.google.com/turgan/FireIsland/photo#map
I am in no way an expert in any of these fields. Also English is my second language. Please excuse and alert me, on any errors I might have below.
Tools:
- GPS Tuner 5.0 http://www.gpstuner.com/download/index.html
- GPS Tuner Map Calibrator http://www.gpstuner.com/download/index.html
- Firefox http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/
- Screen grab http://www.screengrab.org/
- Photoshop (optional)
- Super-Googer: http://pallit.lhi.is/bigice/bigpic.html
- http://www.earthtools.org/
First we’re going to load a custom map (an actual geospatial image of the location) off the net to our GPS Tuner Map Calibrator on our desktop computer.
Then we’re going to calibrate and break this map into parts so Gpstuner can give us a high quality map covering a large area.
We are going to load these into our Pocket PC, preferable to our memory card.
Once in the pocket pc we’ll make sure our camera’s and our pocket pc’s time is synced. Then we are ready to start taking photos.
Once our trip is complete we’ll transfer the photos and the logs and if needed, convert them to a GPX format. (especially required for GpicSync)
Then we’ll use GPicSync or RoboGeo to tag the exif’s of our photos and generate google maps enabled photo gallery of our trip using either one of these software or the awesome Google Picasa.
Here we go
Part 1 - Getting our hiking map into pocket pc GPS Tuner
We are going to use geospatial images for our geocaching map.
It’s not easy to get tiles for anywhere we like, so we’re going to have to work our way to it.
Also
Warning: This one is a huge gray area. http://web.media.mit.edu/~nvawter/projects/googlemaps/index.html It is semi-illegal to get these images without paying for them. These are all copyrighted images. I highly advise against saving them to your harddrive, printing them, and even using this guide to do your geocaching/gps photography.
Also don’t download mp3’s. As a matter of fact, try not to buy ipod’s because it is an incentive to download illegal mp3’s which fills up 80% of the ipods on the market today. Do support your favorite artists by linking to their purchasable songs from your pretentious neo-look-at-the-cool-mixtape-i-did mp3 blogs. Also don’t watch copyrighted illegal video’s on Youtube. If you see a copyrighted video on youtube, flag it and ask Google to remove them. Try to catch them on tv. A bit sarcastic here; but I’m serious.
Done with the warning. On to our piracy.
Super-Googer http://pallit.lhi.is/bigice/bigpic.html Gives you the ability to display any location by simply pasting satellite map tiles code into this page. How do we find the code of a particular map tile?
By viewing the location we’ll be terkking at in Google maps. View the site you want to visit in Google maps and select the correct zoom level you want to maps in,
Example:
Now my starting point of the trip, thus my starting tile is the train station , so it’s somewhere around here:
In your Firefox, go to TOOLS > PAGE INFO and browse to the MEDIA tab. Once in media tab, you’re going to have to find the exact tile that this image represents. In this case, it’s this:
“tqsqtstsstrrtstsq”
Each zoom level adds one letter to this code. Details are explained here. Be careful that this might not be the image of the exact zoom level you might be looking for. For example tqsqtstsstrr is from the same location as tqsqtstsstrrtstsq but 5 zoom levels up.
Anyhow, we paste this code into Super-Googer, change the Number of horizontal/vertical tiles as you like.
This is our final trekking map that we’ll load into our pocket pc:
http://pallit.lhi.is/bigice/makeme.php?startPic=tqsqtstsstrrtstsq+&hTiles=15&vTiles=20
This page is made up of many small tiles, if you right click and choose Save as… it will only save one tile. Somehow we have to save them all as 1 image.
For this we need a great Firefox extension named Screen grab.
Once you installed Screengrab just fire it up by clicking on the status bar icon on the lower right corner of firefox and choose Save > Complete Page / Frame and save your map to a location.
(Notice: If your Number of horizontal/vertical tiles are HUGE, ie. 30 tiles x 30 tiles, you might have some memory problems)
Now that we saved our image, there’s only one adjustment to make before we calibrate this map and load it into our Pocket PC. Somehow the images saved with Screen Grab do not show the Pixels / Inch. Which I usually keep around 72 pixels / inch (GPS Tuner suggests 96dpi but their default map is 72 somehow). So I open this image up in Photoshop. Go to Image-Image Size, set the Resolution to 72 pixels / inch (even though it already shows so) and then save the image in MEDIUM quality format to the same location.
From GPS Tuner 5.0 Manual:
When scanning maps for GPS Tuner, we suggest a 96 dpi resolution.
For best results, keep map pixel size under 5000 x 5000 pixels.
Keep file size under 20 MB (use higher compression if necessary).
Although GPS Tuner supports the calibration of rotated maps, for best results we suggest to use North-oriented maps.
Now we load map calibrator and open our saved final map image.
In order to calibrate the map we’re going to use the page:
Go to Find Places on the main page, and type Garrison. Garrison in New York is somehow the 20th match. Click on the Zoom that’s right under Garrison - United States of America, New York
Switch to satellite view and zoom in further to find the train station in garrison. I’m going to use the corner of this overpass as a calibration point in Gps Tuner Map Calibrator. I drag the crosshair in the Earthtools maps to this corner, and click on LOCATION tab in Earthtools page on the upper left.
it shows me what the coordinates are:
Latitude
41° 23′ 3" N
Longitude:
73° 56′ 47" W
And this is exactly why I type in GPS Tuner Map Calibrator. In map calibrator I click and hold on the corner of this exact location of overpass until the Add New.. > Calib Point pops up, and I type the above values in there. I make sure that N and W values are correct. If not you’ll have to click on the E in the popup ADD CALIBRATION DATA window in map calibrator to change it to W, so that you have 73° 56′ 47" W rather than 73° 56′ 47" E.
I repeat this step 2+ times for other locations on the map, so that I get a finely calibrated map.
Once this is done, I save this map in Map Calibrator by Save… > Save Multiscale Map Slices
Once they are saved on my harddrive, I transfer them to my pocket pc under my memory card, under a GARRISON directory.
Then, on my Pocket PC the only thing I have to do is click on the map screen 
click on Open map 
button and select my map to load it into GPS Tuner.
PART 2 - The Trip, Recording our logs, optimizing Gps tuner tiles
If your GPS is working and positioned it will automatically center you on the map.
You have to make sure that GPS Tuner is recording logs. For this, under click on the Manager Window icon 
and start your NMEA and Tracklog logs.
Once you’re on the border of a map image slice, a new slice showing your current location should show up…if not take a look at here:
http://www.gpstuner.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=5184&sid=a9d796b7b336a57b5b1bfdcd93df25c4
“You may increase the speed of the load time by:
If your maps on stored on SD card, move them to a folder on your PDA "Main Memory".
Reducing the file-size of the map-slices.
Reducing the resolution of the map-slices.
Increasing the number of map-slices…“
http://www.gpstuner.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=4889
“If you have an average hardware (average CPU speed, average RAM speed, average Card speed, etc), you would probably be well advised to load medium sized (1000×1000 pixel) pictures or smaller. The logic is that your hardware would need to access image slices less frequently, but the intitial tradeoff is that the loadtime for the image would be longer than, say - a 500×500 pixel image.
So here’s my theory: Make a map-slice based on the dimensions of your PDA screen (mine is 320×240), with the initial overlap set at half the larger number (320 for me). Then set your PDA overlap setting to half of that number (160 for me). This will follow the Developer’s logic (as show above), and only force the program to load those images of your map in whichever direction you might be travelling.”
SCREEN SIZES:
DELL X51v 640×480
Palm Tungsten T5 320×480
DELL AXIM X30 240×320
Treo 650 320×320
http://www.gpstuner.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1239
demnos
“I just set the overlap to 50px (as I had exported with 100px) and it works like a charm!!!! No problems whatsoever!I still cannot believe the solution was that simple. And actually logical, Map Export counts the pixels on both sides as it calculates how much bigger to make the map (a 933 pixel map becomes 1033 pixels in total with 100 overlap) and GPS Tuner on the other hand needs to know when to start loading the next slice, which of course is half of that.”
Developer
Site Admin“You sould use 120 pixel overlap in GPS Tuner if you have redered map with 240 in Map Calibrator. Unfortunately Map Calibrator is undocumented, so the only thing I could do it to set the default overlap 320 in MC and 160 in GPS Tuner and until users leave them it sould work.
So, please try to use 120 px.”
PART 3 - Transfering Photos and logs to computer to create GPS Photo Tour of our trip
We’re going to transfer the photos to our computer, encode the location of each photo to the exif header, and upload them online to view them on a map.
We have many options to do this:
- GPS Visualiser
- GPICSync
- Robogeo
- Google Picasa (this is a fantastic solution for these reasons: Easy to upload, the photos have a Next-Previous button in the google maps balloon, it works very fast, it accepts 500 photos and processes them faster than any solution, it also has an amazing "Play" feature which switches through each photo and gives you a google maps tour of your trip!)
Once our map is ready, our batteries are loaded we, we synchronize the time of our PDA with that of our camera and take our trip. Then all you have to do is transfer the files to the computer. This includes the images from the camera as well the tracklog (trk file) or the NMEA log from the pocket pc.
Whether your file is a tracklog or a NMEA file, it’s best if you convert it to GPX first.
You can upload the file and have it converted here:
Once your file is converted and saved,
Install GPICSYNC from the following location. Load your pictures directory and your GPX file to the program and follow instructions.
OR
You can also try ROBOGEO.
I’m not going to go into the detail of these programs. In all of these programs all you have to provide is a GPX or a NMEA tracklog, and a directory for photos. These programs automatically match the images with the gps log and stamp the location data to the exif of the photos.
Next is using these programs to create a google map. Getting a google api key is necessary for some of these solutions.
Or Google Picasa:
Google came out with a new feature on 6/27/2007. Geocode your photos with one of the above three programs and your geocoded photos to Picasa. Your Geocoded photos will have a little cross-hair in the lower left corner of their thumbnail in picasa. As seen:
Result is here: http://picasaweb.google.com/turgan/FireIsland/photo#map
UPDATE 1.1 6/28/2008
Added Google Picasa solution above.