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A few years ago I wrote about adding GPS coordinates to your photos. Much has changed since then, and I thought I’d write about how I Geotag photos these days without using a GPS receiver.

Of course you can always use a GPS receiver, but they are generally a pain to carry around for casual photos. Also I fully expect consumer cameras to have some form of A-GPS support very soon. Till then this solution is easy, we get to use all the location information associated with WiFi access points that are all over the world.

Requirements for Geotagging without GPS

1. An Eye-Fi card with a Geotagging subscription
2. Downloader Pro for downloading your photos

Eye-Fi

The Eye-Fi card is a neat little memory card for your camera. It has a built in WiFi chip so that you can have your photos automatically copied to your home computer or a photo sharing service. However, the coolest feature of all is that the Eye-Fi card is always looking for nearby WiFi access points and recording what access points the card “sees”.

note: there are numerous models of the Eye-Fi card. They all support Geotagging via an optional upgrade from their website. However, the Eye-Fi Explore comes with unlimited Geotagging as part of the purchase price.

Later on when the Eye-Fi software is copying the photos to your computer it looks up the GPS coordinates of the WiFi access point and then stamps the GPS coordinates like this:

+37° 26' 57.00", -122° 9' 50.00"

that’s cool and everything, but not really all that useful. Enter Downloader Pro

Downloader Pro

If you consider yourself an amateur or pro photographer you simply need this software.

Downloader Pro does one thing, and only one thing. It moves photos from one place (usually your camera) to another (usually your hard drive).

There are literally a million options in this program, but I only use a few. What I do is that I point Downloader Pro at the folder that Eye-Fi uses to store photos copied from my camera via WiFi.

important: your photos must be copied via WiFi to your computer or the GPS coordinates won’t be included.

Rename Photos

I rename all my photos from the default camera photos to a format like this:

20090123_G10_0011.jpg

This means:

{Year}{Month}{Day}_{Camera Model}{Camera counter #}

This essentially gives all my photos a unique and sequential file name

Up till today though I’ve been clueless about the GPS features in Downloader Pro, and there are many. However, the one I’m going to talk about assumes that the GPS coordinates are already in the photo.

Configure the Reverse GeoCode feature

Select GPS Settings from the Edit menu and enable the second checkbox:

Reverse Geocode is when you take GPS coordinates and turn them into a set of human readable words. Many iPhone applications do this already.

In my case I store these in the IPTC/XMP fields of the photo so that I don’t need to bother with tagging my photos with City, State or Country, although you could certainly also use the tokens below to create Keywords based on the Geocoded names.

Store Place Names in the IPTC fields

Select IPTC/XMP data from the Edit menu and select the Origin tab.

Now enter the following into the respective boxes:

If you did this right it should look like so:

Now when you download the photos from your Eye-Fi photos using Downloader Pro you should see something like this (see location info in the meta data area).

So in the end this:

+37° 26' 57.00", -122° 9' 50.00"

was translated to:

Palo Alto, California, United States

Pretty cool.