This article considers geotagging photos from a Mac perspective, looking at automatic and manual methods, and explaining terms such as data loggers, track points, waypoints, and routes. It lists OS X software options for connecting to data loggers, converting track log formats, geo-locating photos, and writing that data to EXIF for both raw and JPEG images. It also covers the importance of time synchronization, what you can do with geotagged photos, workflow, choosing a data logger and controlling it from your Mac.
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Tag archive for 'metadata'
Geotagging (or geocoding if you prefer) is the act of associating your content (blog posts, photos, feeds, etc.) with a geographic location (e.g. via latitude and longitude co-ordinates). Thus tagged authors can "mash" their content together with the likes of Google Maps, or the Flickr Map if photography is your thing. However, co-ordinates are typically encoded within metadata (or microformat) tags making them visible to machines but hidden from people. We have de facto web standard icons to help identify feeds, OPML, and sharing—so why not for geotagged content?
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If you had viewed the source of my WordPress-generated pages a while ago you'd have noticed that my head elements were a real mess. Now they've been spring cleaned, arranged neatly into related groupings and the needless clutter disposed of. Plugins that use the wp_head hook distribute junk all over the show, offending any sense of order. Luckily your WordPress theme is the key to taking control of your head, through a combination of edits to functions.php and header.php.
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Having settled on SimplePie as a solution for embedding iStockPhoto feeds, I decided to see if I could use it to parse the latest posts from multiple sites in my OPML file (blogroll if you prefer). Would it really be as simple to cook as it sounded? There were qualifiers, however. I wanted to show only a selection of headlines at any one time. I wanted to vary the order in which the sites were listed. And I wanted to automatically fetch and display the favicon for each site. Armed only with copy-and-paste level PHP know-how, I was going to need help in the kitchen—that much was clear at the outset.
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Well, not for dummies—but for non-professional photographers, amateurs, or prosumers (as you like). This article represents my evolving understanding of the options you have during raw conversion with ACR 3.1, and during post-processing in Photoshop CS2 (following nearly 3 years of shooting JPEG, ignoring colour management, and tinkering with Photoshop 7). I like a "one product does it all" solution. I descibe a workflow that will hopefully make sense for most images—assuming that like me you want to work on one at a time, to edit once, and your interest is in capturing what's there and not "faking it". I'll make changes as I discover what does or doesn't work, and acquire new knowledge (maybe even skill?). Your feedback and suggestions would be much appreciated. This is a fairly long article, but there's a graphic summary at the end!
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I've already looked at raw ability in Photoshop CS2, together with image editing features for post-processing. The question is should I upgrade to CS2 (from Photoshop 7 and Elements 3) when my Nikon D70 arrives, or spend similar money on Nikon Capture instead. How do they broadly compare in terms of features? At this point I'm not interested in technical subtleties, just a broad feature run-down for Joe Average.
Continue reading 'Photoshop CS2 vs. Nikon Capture 4.2'
