Me: I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, both in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC and in Windows Live on Hotmail, Calendar and People. I am currently a Principal Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Social Networking team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for delivering features to support our web and client applications. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics.
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© Copyright 2010, Omar Shahine
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Lately, I’ve been interested in Geotagging my photos. Ever since smugmug added mapping support it got me thinking. 10 years from now it would be sweet to be able to pull up photos from travel and sightseeing and see where those places actually are. Lora and I are going back to Paris and Egypt in a few weeks and I wish that I could see all the pictures that I took last time on a map. Now that would be nifty.
My Camera doesn’t have GPS, but 2 weeks ago in Vegas I saw Reeves with one of these Garmin Geko 201 devices. It’s a bit large and ugly, but it’s cheap. Doing some more research I found the Garmin Foretrex 101 which seems a bit nicer. Both will set you back about $125. The Foretrex is a bit smaller, has longer batterylife, and can be mounted to your wrist (or in my case, camera strap or bag).
Why do I want an external GPS device? Well Microsoft Research has written two neat applications which they have on their World Wide Media Exchange website. WWMX TrackDownload will connect to a Garmin GPS device via the Serial Port (don’t ask, apparentley serial is still popular at Garmin) and downloads thousands of little “bread crumb” tracks. You can then use WWMX Location Stamper to load the GPS data and automatically stamp your photos with the nearest GPS breadcrumb. The Location Stamper will also allow you to stamp your photos using the Mappoint web services.
Now this brings me to my next point. This GPS technology is soo ass backwards. My camera should have a chip, like my phone. However, comparing it to my phone is lame because the functionality is locked away by the carrier/manufacturer. Instead I have to chose from Garmin who seems to still be making state of the art technology for the 90s. Big ugly serial devices that eat batteries.
I think there is a market here for GPS devices specifically targeted at Geotagging. The good news is that Microsoft Research is providing some great tools to tag photos. Combined with services from smugmug, you can see your photos in 3 dimensions.