General GPS data handling

[ericwilliams]

Hi Everybody,

I've been GPS-tagging since 2006 but I'm rather unimpressed with the current state of the affairs and I would like to know if I'm somehow missing something big here.
Basically what I'm doing: I'm using gpsPhoto.pl (from SourceForge.net) to insert EXIF/IPTC data as Longitude, Latitude, Altitude, Country, City into all my jpegs based on matching timestamps (I keep GPS tracks for most activities). That works reasonably fine.
I keep all pictures in one iView catalog and I can quickly find pictures by country/city.
However I'm not quite happy with this setup. First of all I just had to start the 2nd catalog because of iView limitations. Then I would like to find all pictures I took around a specific location (let's say a given distance from a given location in google earth) and I don't think this is possible in iView. This would be the spacial equivalent to "find pictures that are taken at most X days from this particular day".

Anybody knows about some software (not necessarily with so many features as iView) but one that can handle GPS data and have one or some of the following features:

- larger catalogs
- more features to look for pictures around a place
- ability to add locations from a folder with GPS logs; i.e. to do some kind of GPS tagging but insert the tags only in its internal database without changing the picture file itself?

Thanks,
Eric

[peterkrogh]

eric,
I think you're on the right track with all your requests. I'm not aware of anything that does this right now, but I'd expect this to be coming before too long.

What we can do right now is to add the tags, which you are doing.

How many images are in your iView catalogs?  Did you realize that Expression Media can show tagged images in Virtual Earth?  You can also add GPS tags in expression, but at the moment it's database only, and won't write to the file. (Which you seem to want, but I don't).
Peter

[ericwilliams]

The thing is we've been waiting for years and things aren't really moving and I'm getting quite frustrated. I have around 118900 items in my "main" catalog (1.4GB, 10++ years) but I started a new one for this year because I think I'll be running into the 120k (or 128k?) limitation. I'm no pro and I want things as simple as possible (except for backups of which I do 3 different kinds).
I might take a look at Expression Media but I assume the catalog limitations are more or less the same. Luckily I don't care about importing because I'm in a special case, all the info is in the files themselves so I can rebuild the catalog for any new program by just adding the folders I want.
I might try the Google Earth feature (wasn't aware about it). Apart from that anything really different from iView? I need support for video files, more specifically DV (unprocessed, avi type-1) and MJPEG, this was provided via Quicktime in iView, any difference in Expression Media?

Eric.

[peterkrogh]

Eric,
Unfortunately, no improvement in catalog capacity in EM.
It still uses Quicktime (on Mac - QT or WIC on PC) to render, so those capabilities should be the same.

I agree development has been slow. One thing I think we'll see are web-based services that can hook onto catalog software.  this is probably a better architecture than having it all in the catalog - it can grow and evolve faster, and can let you hook onto other databases. 

It's not a simple problem to figure out how to enable this, however. Once you open up the hooks to let someone integrate with your catalog, you need to support that configuration for some time. So you don't do this until the catalog has matured.

The problem is also exacerbated by metadata-handling issues. You probably want to make use of IPTC and EXIF (as well as XMP copies of both of these fields.) Right now, there are no standard ways to accomplish this. Again, once a company commits to an implementation, they are stuck with it for a while.

You may have had the desire for GPS data with photos for a while, but that would make you a pretty unusual user.  It's really starting to snowball at the moment, however, so you're not alone anymore.  And with iPhoto starting down this road (not to mention iPhone tagging, as well as the efforts of Microsoft through Expression Media and ProPhoto Tools,) momentum is starting to build rapidly.

Peter