Geo-coding holiday photos

This morning I was still working on geo-coding my images from Japan and Korea. The problem I was having with geo-coding using GeoSetter was that my images are organised into folders, where for geo-coding them I really needed just a list of all images sorted in date order.

So I tried Lightroom 2.5 with Jeffrey Friedl's Geocoding plugin. Lightroom 2.5 can list all the images in a folder and subfolders in date/name order, so that's good. Unfortunately, the geo-coding plugin workflow isn't so good. You have to select the images you want to geo-code in the Lightroom Library, then go to File > Plugin Extras > Geoencode. You need to have google earth open (I actually prefer using Google Earth for geocoding as opposed to GeoSetter's Google Maps interface, though there's not a lot of difference).

You locate the correct location in Google Earth, which is quite hard due to much of Seoul looking the same and also the low resolution satellite imagery that exists for South Korea. Then back in Lightroom, on the geoencoding plugin dialog, you click a button to get the co-ordinates from Google Earth. You then click a button to save the GPS 'Shadow Data' to the Lightroom database, and then have to go to a different tab (on the geoencoding plugin dialog still), and click another button to write the GPS info to an XMP sidecar file.

You then close the Geoencoding plugin, select your next image(s) and repeat the process again. Since the GPS data is only saved to XMP sidecar files, when you're finished with the batch you'd need to use exiftool to write the GPS data into the actual RAW files.

Another problem with Lightroom is that there's not an easy way to see what images have geo co-ordinates, and which don't. You can see if a single image has GPS co-ordinates in the metadata panel, but when looking for images that need geo-coding, you don't want to have to be clicking on every single image to check whether it is already geocoded or not. Lightroom does have a filter/search function, but this only seems to work with a few metadata fields (which GPS isn't one of).

Also, if you update the GPS co-ordinates for your images outside of Lightroom, you will then need to 'Read Metadata from image(s)' in Lightroom to get it to update its database, which seems to be pretty slow.

While I was waiting for Lightroom to re-index the images' metadata, and also while I was waiting for exiftool to geocode some images using a gps tracklog, I checked my email. One of the emails I got had a link to a review of Windows 7. Reading the review I saw that Windows 7 isn't much faster than Windows Vista, and in some cases is even slower. So it seems all those posts I've read from people in forums claiming Windows 7 was much faster were just rubbish. It does seem (according to the review) that Windows 7 is a bit less bloated than Windows Vista though, a shame it doesn't actually give any stats for RAM usage. So I think I'll probably stick with Vista for the moment rather than shelling out for a small performance increase.

The rest of the day I just spent geocoding images from our holiday - unfortunately it seems I forgot to have the GPS switched on a lot of the time (or sometimes the battery would run out and I wouldn't notice).

The weather was overcast all day.

Food
Breakfast: Bowl of crunchy nut cornflakes; cup o' tea.
Lunch: 2x cheese on toasts; apple; Clementine; Mince Pie; Slice of home-made chocolate cereal cake; cup o' tea.
Dinner: Chicken; Gravy; Roast Potatoes; Roast Parsnips; Ground Black Pepper. Pudding was swiss roll with custard. Coffee.
Supper: Hot Cocoa; Milk chocolate digestive; shortbread finger.