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How to GPS Tag photos with your Nokia N800 and GPSbabel … The instructions here are not really specific to a Nokia N800, so other GPS units should use very similar steps. Only the GPSBabel part will probably change options based on your GPS device.

I’ve been taking my N800 and bluetooth GPS receiver on my hikes. Really just as a way to track approximate mileage. After doing that a few months, it seemed there had to be a way to put the GPS lat/lon into my photos. There is. A few other uses for GPS data, beyond the obvious:

1. Retain your track data
2. Estimate distance covered
3. GPS tag your photos
4. Share your track as a route for other hikers
5. Post a track on Google Maps for others – nice visualization with all the zoom and pan that you expect from google.
6. Mark the actual location of a landmark – waterfall, lookout point, or geocache

So far I’ve retained many of my tracks, but not been able to view them except on the N800. That’s useful, to a point. I’d really like to record them and create a database of visual tracks that is viewable on google maps for my friends to view. The real idea is to create a database of local hikes with trailheads, distances and difficulty ratings to help select future hikes.

Enter gpsbabel

Gpsbabel is a tool converts GPS data between many, many different devices and formats that runs on any platform – win32, unix, linux, N800. It supports conversion between … I guess about 50 different formats. My need is to convert N800/Maemo-Mapper GPX data into something GoogleMaps can use, KML. Originally, I thought gmaps supported GPX too, but that never worked well enough and had limited waypoint support. Yes, KML is the best answer for this.

Conversion steps for maemo-mapper gpx files into kml files that google-maps can display.

1. Get the GPX file off your N800 … somehow (scp, ftp, pull the memory card and copy the data, whatever)
2. Use gpsbabel to convert the file to KML.

   gpsbabel -t -i gpx -f “$1” -o kml,points=0 -F “$1.kml”

   points=0 option drops some data, so the resulting track isn’t exact.
3. Move the .KML file to a web server that googlemaps can access, anywhere really, on your desktop probably isn’t gonna work.
4. Have google maps display the data – a sample Laughing Falls, NC by fashioning a URL like the link here. Basically, you use http://maps.google.com/maps?q={full-URL-to-file.kml} The file can be waypoints, traces or routes as far as I can tell.

The result isn’t a nice track until you uncheck the Points on the resulting page. Also, I’ve tried to get gpsbabel to reduce the track to a radius around the importance locations, but that isn’t working. Loading gpsbabel was trivial on my Ubuntu laptop and desktop –

sudo apt-get install gpsbabel

, if memory serves.

No Google API key needed for this method either, which is nice.

Another helpful tool for geocaching and the N800 is gpsview. It connects to the GPS receiver and performs bearing math for you. It also helps calm the GPS data and average it out so you know where you are with a higher degree of accuracy after a few minutes, GPS data floats about 50 feet, IME. This tool is very helpful with some geocache hints. So, you have a location and need a bearing for the next cache location or you have a bearing and need a new lat/lon. gpsview does those calculations. I’d post a link, but I can’t find it now. Perhaps it was in the OS2008 depot and just loaded when I selected it.

Get out there and find some fun caches or just hike and know how close you are to roads and streams and where you’ve already been. There’s something fun about searching for a hidden location/waterfall, finding it, then taking an almost direct path back to your car.

Enter gpsPhoto.pl to tag your photos with GPS data

Tagging your photos with GPS coordinates:

gpsPhoto.pl —gpsfile HT-File.gpx \


	
Camera & GPS times match

            —timeoffset 0 \
	
Find closest GPS point (2 minutes)

            —maxtimediff 180 —dir ./ 

I came across a CSV list of waterfalls, converted it into KML and here’s the resulting googlemaps link. I know it is missing many water falls. I’ve been to some that are fairly large and they aren’t in the list. I have no idea how accurate any of these GPS points are either. YMMV.

Now that we have placed our GPS data into the photos, many of the photo hosting sites will display that either on a map or as part of the extra data. I’ve hacked together some GPS code for MyPhotoGallery that will link to google map locations for any photos that contain GPS data. Here’s an example of the EXIF data and Google Maps link that is added to every image displayed in the gallery.

Embedded EXIF data
Camera: SONY DSC-W55
Exposure: 1/160 sec.
Aperture: f/7.1
Focal length: 6.3 mm
ISO: 100
Flash: No
Date taken: Feb 21, 2009 at 3:17:21 PM
GPS: 34.135167,-84.704180

I’ve also hacked search into the perl and provided the search updates back to the original developer. He elected to remove search from his code many years ago. If you are interested in my changes photo gallery, they are hacks, let me know. If there is enough interest, I’ll post them for all.

So, I’ve been hiking a bunch this year and searching for waterfalls is a hobby. If you have access to my photo gallery, you get a feel for the lengths that I’ve gone thru to find them.

Anyway, as I was planning my next trip to NC, I came across this site: http://www.northcarolinawaterfalls.info/ FANTASTIC! It places markers on a google map for where all the waterfalls are located and occasionally provides links and directions.

It has more waterfalls which appear to be accurately located on a map than anyplace I’ve seen before.