Auto geocoding photos without a GPS Camera

I like to geocode my photos, since I keep them in Picasa. Pacasa will locate you photo on a Google map if they are geocoded. Many modern camera's have built in GPS, but mine doesn't. I do have an Android cell phone that does. There is a (free) Android Application called "Route Recorder for Photographer" (RRP)that will do all the hard work.

1. Download the app from the Android Market Place.

2. Sync your camera's clock with your cell phone's clock

3. Open "Route Recorder for Photographer" on your cell phone and press "Start"

4. Start taking pictures, all day if you wish, A one gigabyte SD card will hold 45 million way-points.

5. When you are finished taking photos and are ready to transfer them to you computer, remember the file location (folder) you store them in.

6. Open RRP on your phone and "stop" recording way-points. Click "Options" and select "Create photoGPS.exe" (you only have to do this once).

7. Either move the SD card to your computer's card reader or tether you cell phone via USB cable.

8. Copy two file to a know location (I use the Desktop) photoGPS.exe and gpsTrackfile.bin.

9. Goto the "command prompt", put yourself in the directory that contains the two files. In my case Vista put me in c:users\Tom to get to the desktop you need to type "cd \desktop" then you
will be at c:users\Tom\desktop>

10. If you just run the photoGPS.exe file it will show you the syntax required to execute the program.


11. I only use the -t and -p parameters.  This is the tricky part, you have to get the syntax right or it won't execute.

This is how my command line looks:

C:\users\Tom\Desktop> photoGPS -t test.bin -p c:\users\tom\pictures\gpstest

The name of the file holding the way-points "gpstrackerfile.bin" is the default.  You can change that for each session, but remember the the new .bin filename for this command.  In the above example I changed it to "test.bin"

12.  The second file is the location you are storing the photos you took for this session.  In may case they are folders in the "Pictures" folder.  Example c:\users\tom\pictures\gpstest as I named it above

13  If it executes properly you will see a list of files (jpgs) that were updated with GPS coding.