Geotag Your Digital Camera Photos in Lightroom with a Smartphone GPS

Geotagging is a process that adds geographical location information to your photos' metadata. For example, if you took a photo of the Golden Gate Bridge, a geotagged photo will have the location of where you took the photo near the Golden Gate Bridge. This is great for photo programs such as iPhoto or Lightroom that allows you to sort your photos by location. This is also great info to have if you use photo services such Flickr to share your photos with family and friends. In the image example, using the location data from photos, I can see where I took my various photos. This feature might be of interest to people who travel, pros with large batches of photos from different locations or just someone who wants to know where they took their photos. New cameras with gps or smartphones with gps will usually add this location information into its photos' metadata.

However, older digital cameras or most DSLRs usually do not have a built in GPS unit to add this geographical location information. So if you have a GPS enabled smartphone such as an iPhone or Android phone and desire to add location info to your jpgs or raw images, READ ON!

In a nutshell, in this guide, I will show you how to use your phone's GPS to record your location information then inject that information into your photos. Once you have your equipment setup, this process should not take more than 3 mins in addition to your regular post processing rituals. For this guide, I will use a Mac, Android phone and My Tracks app.

Required Tools:
- A point and shoot digital camera or DSLR
- A computer running Windows or Apple OSX
- Adobe Lightroom 2 or 3 (LR3)
- Geoencoding Plugin for Lightroom, Link: http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/gps
- A GPS enabled smartphone (Android, iPhone, etc)
- Google's My Tracks or another app that allows GPS logging or recording to .gpx file format

For this guide, I will use a Mac, Android phone and My Tracks app.

Prerequisite Skills:
-Working knowledge of your camera and smartphone
-Working knowledge of Adobe Lightroom

Step 1 Preparing Your Camera and Phone

Before we even start recording our gps information or taking photos, we need to prep all of our tools.

IMPORTANT
If you do not prepare your tools correctly, you will not have accurate or any location information for your photos.

Lets prepare our camera and phone. Go into your camera's settings menu and adjust the date and time so it matches your phone . The purpose of doing this is that the plugin for Lightroom will match the your photos time and date with the time and date of where you were at based on your phone's GPS information. Or in other words, the date and time of our photo will correspond to a date and time to where you were standing. After you adjust the time on your camera, make sure you have an app on your smartphone that allows you to record your GPS data. For this guide, I will use Google's My Tracks. You can download this app on Android's app store.

Comments

[blinkyblinky]

How did you get that Golden Gate Bridge picture looking like that?

[ArkusM]

Thanks for sharing. Will have to give this a try... Cheers