New version of PhotoGPSEditor is now available. This is a minor update with improved import of poorly formated nmea files, and improved export of geotagged photos.

With PhotoGPSEditor you can add location and summary details to a photo file. The location information consists of latitude and longitude data, as well as town, area/region, and country. This can be either added automatically by matching up photos with GPS (gpx or NMEA) file track data, manually (just type it in) or ‘automatically’ by placing a pointer on a map to get the latitude and longitude data. The program can then add town, area/region, and country information. This process can also be described as ‘geocoding’ a picture/photo.

The program is ideal for geocoding photos with ‘Places’ information before importing in to iPhoto.

PhotoGPSEditor also allows meta-data to be edited in single or multiple photo (JPEG/RAW/Tiff) files at once.

PhotoGPSEditor is available for download

Nice little write-up on PhotoGPSEditor over at Bioneural.

Basically Bioneural gives a good little run down on geotagging photos on the Mac. It is a nice piece and worth a read.

I particularly enjoyed the part that said:

“One of these methods allows you to zoom in using satelite view in Google Maps to the point where you were standing—and best of all you only need to mark one photo in a set this way, and the offset will be applied to all photos in the set. Very clever:”

It was the “very clever” bit I liked!

No mention in the article of PhotoInfoEditor, which can be used to geotag photos when no GPS data is available…

PhotoInfoEditor and PhotoGPSEditor are freeware programs from MMISoftware – continued development can be supported by making donations (PhotoInfoEditor Donation | PhotoGPSEditor Donation), or purchases at the MMISoftware GPS and camera stores.

Both programs are available for download:

Just looking through the list of 300+ new features in Leopard and spotted the following on ‘GPS’.

It appears in Preview that there is GPS metadata support. In fact it says:

“Get real information from your photos. If your image has embedded GPS metadata, Preview will show you exactly where that perfect photo was taken. Open the Image inspector and select GPS. Preview pinpoints the location where you took the photo on a world map. From there you can even open the GPS location in Google Maps.”

Fantastic! I just hope they have iPhoto sorted so when editing photos it no longer ‘chews-up’ added GPS meta-data.

Get the GPS units fired up, and those photos tagged.

For geotagging of photos why not try: PhotoInfoEditor and PhotoGPSEditor from MMISoftware.

MMISoftware GPS Store | MMISoftware Camera Store

Well, things have been quite at MMISoftware, not because we have not been working, but because we have been working! One thing we have been doing is working with Duncan and Rob over at Minor Problems who are taking part in the 2007 Mongol Rally. Basically, MMISoftware are sponsoring them! Our first ‘official’ sponsorship!!

So, what has MMISoftware been doing for Team Minor Problems?

Well, we have ‘taken-over’ the updating and maintenance of their website. Have a look at Minor Problems to see what is going on, and we have also set up a blog for them.

In addition, we have been providing technical support in ‘equipping’ the guys with the necessary hardware (and some software) so they can send ‘live’ (or as close to live as we can get) reports from the rally, and also provide a ‘tracking solution’ so they can record their route.

Rob and Duncan decided they wanted to be able to:

• send back photos
• send back reports of our progress and any problems
• give a ‘live’ update of our location

The solution we came up with is to use internet cafes to send reports and photos, when such cafes are available, and to use a mobile phone to send reports and photos when they can’t get to a cafe.

The phone they are using is a Samsung U700, which has Bluetooth and a 3.2 megapixel camera. Using the phone it is hoped that the guys can send back photos and text files as emails attachments. For writing the blog text we have donated a Palm T3 on to which we have installed a text editing package (TexT) and a file zipping package called HandZipper (Handwatch) (HandZipper compresses the text in to a smaller file so it is quicker, easier and cheaper to send).

The way the guys are going to have to work this, when they can’t get to an internet cafe, is to write blog posts on the Palm, zip the file and use Bluetooth to send the zipped file to the phone, where they can be attached to an email, along with any photos, to be sent back.

To work out the location they are going to use a Garmin Geko (again, donated by MMISoftware), to provide the current location (latitude and longitude), as well enabling them to ‘track’ the number of miles they do each day, and their average speed. The GPS unit is fairly basic and does not provide any mapping or ‘direction’ functions, but will be more than sufficient for their needs.

Finally, we hope that Team Minor Problems will be able to produce a GPS track record of their adventure, and for this MMISoftware has given them a Sony GPS data logger… It is hoped that they will be able to send back some ‘track-logs’ from internet cafes, but we may have to wait until we get back to the UK.

If all goes well, and to plan, we hope that Team Minor Problems will be posting regular updates and news to the blog of their rally adventure, so to follow their progress why not subscribe to their blog rss feed or their email newsletter?

If you are interested in GPS tracking, why not visit the MMISoftware GPS Store?

It is great when I get emails from users of PhotoInfoEditor and PhotoGPSEditor. Some emails are bug reports, some are suggestions, some are complaints, some are users complaining the programs are too cheap … anyway, what ever they are please keep them coming.

Recently I have had some great emails:

Michael emailed me with the report of PhotoGPSEditor crashing. This was the new release (version 1.5.3 – read the post) that was causing the problems, and as he sent the ‘crash log’ I could easily locate and solve the problem (took all of 30 minutes) and a new version was posted this evening (version 1.5.4 – read the post). Thanks Michael.

Tony emailed to say how useful he found PhotoInfoEditor and sent in a few suggestions for changes. What was spooky was 75% of the changes he suggested have already been added to the new version of PhotoInfoEditor, which is currently undergoing testing. Again, thanks Tony.

Kim from Korea emailed to report that PhotoGPSEditor would not display DNG images produced by his camera. We have had a long email chat about the problem and he really helped me chase the problem by providing examples of problem DNG files .

As Kim said: “The kids wear Korean traditional clothes and shoes. Shape of Hair means my hometown symbol pine tree.”

First, Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) supports DNG (or so it claims) ‘out of the box’. And indeed it seems to. However, the DNGs Kim sent would not open in Preview, and would not display in PhotoGPSEditor (they reported a formatting error in the debugger). Some digging in the code of PhotoGPSEditor showed that the things really weren’t working as expected. The files were being loaded, but would not translate to an image. Some more work, and a change in the code, and the files Kim had sent (plus some photos from other users), now worked. As a final test I asked Kim for one more example of the type of DNG file his camera produced. And guess what? It wouldn’t load in to PhotoGPSEditor. This was odd… I thought that maybe the file had been damaged ‘in transit’ as Preview also couldn’t open it, but when I tried Photoshop, success! An image! Great! The file was OK, but PhotoGPSEditor didn’t work!

I then tried the file again with PhotoGPSEditor, and it showed a preview image…. odd…. After some ‘experiments’, using an unopened version of the file, I discovered that the act of opening the DNG file in Photoshop, and then closing the file WITHOUT A SAVE ‘fixed’ the photo so it could be displayed by PhotoGPSEditor. How, or why this happens I have no idea!

What was also interesting was that even when PhotoGPSEditor could not display an image from the DNGs, it could still write the meta-data (location information etc.) to the file when it was saved. Therefore, I have now added a ‘feature’ to PhotoGPSEditor that states that the image can’t be viewed, but that the program should still be able to write the meta-data.

If PhotoGPSEditor encounters a file that it can write meta-data to, but can’t display an image, it now states the fact!

These improvements in image handling, and the reporting of ‘problem’ images, will be added to the next version of PhotoInfoEditor.

PhotoInfoEditor and PhotoGPSEditor are freeware programs from MMISoftware – continued development can be supported by making donations (PhotoInfoEditor Donation | PhotoGPSEditor Donation), or purchases at the MMISoftware GPS and camera stores.

Both programs are available for download:

A new version of PhotoGPSEditor has just been released (download). So, what is new in this version?

Well, there are a number of new features, namely: support has been added for the MEF file format; the ExifTool has been updated to the latest version (Exiftool), and finally there is improved the handling of ‘corrupt’ photo files.

In addition to the new features there are a number of bug fixes and most importantly a problem that was causing latitude and longitude data not to be reported has been corrected. This problem was very difficult to track down and required changes in the program and also on the server, which provides the initial map data. An addition ‘wrinkle’ with this problem was that it was only seen by ‘non-registered’ users of the program that had used the program more than 5 times. It was surprising how many people complained about this problem! If they had registered the program (which they could have done for as little as $1, or even for free if they used TrialPay), they would have never encountered this bug.

The new version of PhotoGPSEditor is available for download.

PhotoInfoEditor and PhotoGPSEditor are freeware programs from MMISoftware – continued development can be supported by making donations (PhotoInfoEditor Donation | PhotoGPSEditor Donation), or purchases at the MMISoftware GPS and camera stores.

Both programs are available for download:

Just received an email from a user (I don’t know if they use PhotoInfoEditor or PhotoGPSEditor) alerting me to the addition of PhotoGPSEditor to a Wikipedia page on geocoding.

The geocoding article on Wikipedia is an interesting, however, I would take issue with one point and that is the use of GPS data.

The piece seems to suggest (in its present form – you just know how these Wikipedia pages can change!) that you have to use GPS data to geocode a photo, you do not, you can assign geocoding data, i.e. latitude and longitude, as well as city, region and country, manually (which they do state in the second half of the entry), and this is where PhotoInfoEditor comes in. With PhotoInfoEditor it is possible to assign the geo-location of a photo by simply dragging and dropping a pointer on a map. There is no need to use a GPS unit, you just have to remember where you were when you took the shot, and find it on a map. The ‘bonus’ if you use PhotoInfoEditor to do this is the program will then automatically fill in the city, region and country information for you.

PhotoInfoEditor and PhotoGPSEditor are freeware programs from MMISoftware – continued development can be supported by making donations (PhotoInfoEditor Donation | PhotoGPSEditor Donation), or purchases at the MMISoftware GPS and camera stores.

Both programs are available for download:

A minor update of PhotoGPSEditor, which really addresses only one bug, has been released. The bug in question was not major, but it was annoying and causing some users problems…

Under some rare circumstances if a photo file did not have a thumbnail icon and was using a ‘generic’ system JPEG/TIFF type icon then PhotoGPSEditor would save the file with a low resolution version of the icon. This was not really a problem and in no way affected the file, but it was annoying! Hence the release….

If you have used PhotoGPSEditor and have a number of files with ‘low resolution’ generic icons then you may wish to use PhotoIcon (download) to replace the icons with a thumbnail of the photo.

PhotoGPSEditor is freeware programs from MMISoftware – continued development can be supported by making donations (PhotoGPSEditor Donation), or purchases at the MMISoftware GPS and camera stores. (PhotoIcon is free (more information))

The program is available for download:

Backing up is a serious business. And at MMISoftware we like to keep backups of, well, everything. Over the years we have used a range of methods, including incremental backups to CDs and DVDs, but our current preferred method is to backup to external hard-drives and then remove them to a safe place…

Recently I had a ‘backup’ failure, we didn’t lose any data, but our back-up strategy failed.

Basically what happened was a new external drive was bought (we actually used the Apple Store as they had drives at a good price with a free ’24 hour delivery’), and plugged in for a routine back-up.

However, the backup failed. Odd…. Tried again, same failure. Copy error. Copy error on a brand new disk. So what gives?

Well, it turns out that the LaCie drives that Apple sells are formatted for DOS, and every time the back-up reached 3 GB plus the backup would fail! Weird. Why would Apple sell DOS formatted drives? How many other customers are experiencing that problem? Very annoying….

Anyway, the problem was easy to fix. Fired up ‘Disk Utility’ and reformatted the drive for ‘Mac OS Extended’, and now everything works….

So, if you have a new external drive and are lovingly backing up all the photos you have geotagged, or added meta-data to, with PhotoInfoEditor or PhotoGPSEditor, and you keep getting a ‘copy failure’, you might want to check the format of the external drive….

PhotoInfoEditor and PhotoGPSEditor are freeware programs from MMISoftware – continued development can be supported by making donations (PhotoInfoEditor Donation | PhotoGPSEditor Donation), or purchases at the MMISoftware GPS and camera stores.

Both programs are available for download:

A number of users have emailed MMISoftware about how the ‘map marker’ is used in the PhotoInfoEditor and PhotoGPSEditor. Although both programs use ‘markers’ to get latitude and longitude information, and to show, on a map, where the photos are taken, the latitude and longitude data produced is used differently.

PhotoGPSEditor: In this program the function of the marker is to help match the GPS data to the photos. Moving the marker will not update the information in the picture, it is just to help do the match, and then confirm that the match has worked.

The initial positioning of the marker is used by PhotoGPSEditor to match the selected photo with the GPS data. The program then calculates the difference in time between when the photo was taken, and when the GPS data was recorded.

A ‘map marker’ on a map!

PhotoInfoEditor: The function of the marker in this program is to show the location the photo was taken and moving the marker will update/change the information.

I tend to use PhotoGPSEditor to do a match between GPS data and the photos, and hence add latitude/longitude and location data. I then export the photos for import in to PhotoInfoEditor for ‘fine-tuning’ of position and to add additional information.

PhotoInfoEditor and PhotoGPSEditor are freeware programs from MMISoftware – continued development can be supported by making donations (PhotoInfoEditor Donation | PhotoGPSEditor Donation), or purchases at the MMISoftware GPS and camera stores.

Both programs are available for download: