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Digital Photography meets GPS TechnologyBy Chris Chaplow and Tom Ralph. Have you been out shooting with your digital camera and then by the time you’ve actually got home and downloaded them to your computer you can’t remember where exactly you took the photo? Well if this is a problem that you can relate to then we are can now announce that it is a problem with a solution. A program has been created that can combine digital and GPS technology. GPS stands for Global Positioning Systems. It is a technology that needs 12 satellites in high orbit so that wherever you are in the world you can pick up a signal from at least 5. A GPS device then calculates your exact position in coordinates such as longitude and latitude. The satellites were originally developed for the USA Military and thanks to President Clinton’s March 1996 directive are still operated and maintained by the US Government for worldwide use free of direct user fees. They are now used by an abundance of applications among them handheld and in car navigation devices such as the Navman or TomTom brands which can locate our position to an accuracy of about 10m. Incidentally the EU is currently developing a much more ambitious system called Galileo with 30 satellites costing 3 billion Euros due to be launched in 2008 and offering one metre accuracy. So how do you “write” into your snapshots where they were taken? Take a GPS device and fix it to the camera. This is a technology that is without a doubt being researched by the big names in digital photography. In the not too distant future the user will do little more that clip on the GPS sensor in the same way as we clip on a flashgun. Fortunately the foundations have been laid carefully. Good digital cameras already record information invisibly in the header of the image file. It is called Meta Data and includes time, shutter speed, aperture setting, which lens was used. Standard EXIF (Exchange Information Format) used by most digital cameras already has fields for the latitude and longitude. At the moment cameras with built in GPS capabilities are rare. That is to say a camera that can write latitude and longitude into the EXIF field of the image at the moment when the photo is taken. Some of the high end SLR digital cameras on that can do this. Late last year Nikon started shipping an 'entry level' prosumer camera called the D200, which joins their D1H, D1X, and D2X as cameras that support GPS input. Nikon also offers a GPS cable for about 80 Euro. The 10 million mega pixel D200 is an excellent value camera in its own right at 1800 Euros (body only) available locally at the Corte Ingles or FNAC or from www.jessops.com A GPS compact camera is the ‘Ricoh Pro G3’ with 3.24 effective mega pixels and 3x Optical Zoom. Available on the internet from www.geospatialexperts.com , but at $870 it is still little on the expensive side. You are buying a ready made unit ahead of the field so to speak. Perhaps a good present for the gadget person who has everything. This technology is not just a gadget or a gimmick. My prediction is that within 10 years it will be fully integrated and sold as standard. After all it was only 11 years ago when Kodak/Nikon brought out their first Digital Camera for 30.000 Euros and the London Evening Standard was so proudly able to feature on its front page that afternoon’s Derby winner for the first time ever. It didn’t stop the traffic! There are quite a number of professional uses for this technology. Anybody who looks back at their photographs and has to work out where each one was taken can benefit. In the field of real estate, land surveying, architects, insurance assessors or constructors monitoring progress. Talking of real estate let’s not forget home buyers trying to remember which house they were looking at, or dare I say, nipping back for another look without the agent! You can achieve the same result with a modest digital camera if you are willing to fiddle about a bit. A separate handheld GPS receiver is used to determine the latitude and longitude of where the photo was taken without physically connecting it to the camera. Back at base the process involves synchronizing the time the photos are taken with the recorded GPS information. The software matches the two sets of data and writes the GPS position into the EXIF fields of the image file. Software such as GPS-Photo Link is specially designed for this purpose and retails for $229. Pentax offer a similar system and sell a bundle which includes a Garmin GPS, a Pentax WPi 6 megapixel digital camera, and a special software package that creates web pages of your images with the GPS data for about 600 Euro. There are quite a few companies acknowledging the desire for such a technology and have been selling adapters for the different makes of camera to support GPS. There are a number of ready-made solutions so that you simply give your camera model and GPS model and you can download the software needed. Some systems will already work alongside “Google Earth” or other mapping software to provide user-friendly maps and a good index of the photos that you have taken. The outcome is a digital map with marked points, each one with photos that have been taken at that position. You can then click on the individual ‘markers’ to see the photo. Indexing your photos by their location on a map instead of by date or by roll number is an interesting idea. Will it help us find that special party photo any quicker? At least we have come a long way since storing photos in shoeboxes. Chris Chaplow is director of Andalucia Web Solutions the company that place businesses on the internet. He may be contacted by telephone on 952 89 78 65 or on chris@andaluciaws.com Useful links: http://www.geospatialexperts.com/ricoh.html |
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