Crankybunny

After hours of digitally flipping through photos, cleaning up GPS tracklogs and running my favorite program RoboGEO, I have finally produced a kmz file with embedded photos for display. And moments after I typed that sentence I found out the Google Maps though that my KMZ with embedded photos was too large to display so I do not have an embedded map to show (but there is a downloadable KMZ at the bottom of the post).

The process for geolocation of information is seemingly easy - everyone’s doing it these days (Flickr, Panoramia and others that I would type but I just don’t feel like fact checking right now) - but to do so comprehensively, it really isn’t easy. The only reason this didn’t take me days was that I had already figured out a decent procedure last year for my big bike trip through South America (see Steady As She Goes which is where these should actually be). I used a variety of programs; some purchased, some free.

I love the idea of geotagging and associated documentation of experience, but there are so many disparate sources and methodologies.  I guess that this is really only the beginning.

So I just tried to create a maps.google.com "mapplet" and was told that my kmz file was too big.  While the techonology is there - it takes a lot of fiddling around to get things to work.  I tried another KMZ of the Nazca lines in Peru and in this case the KML would not load in Google Maps but the KMZ would.  There are photos in the point descriptions but the difference is that they are not embedded but stored in a different location on the web.  The next step - to try tomorrow - is to get the urls for the Morocco photos from Flickr, put the url not the actual photo into RoboGEO and see what happens.

Methodology so far:

1. Download lots and lots of photos from camera
2. Download GPS track files
3. Select photo groupings in Picasa and edit photo descriptions
4. Export (in Picasa) selected photos to a separate directory for ease of organization and workflow
5. Use RoboGEO to automatically geolocate photos
6. Use Google Earth to find locations for photos that were un geo-taggable (based on GPS/photo timestamps)
7. Export geotagged photos to Flickr set
8. Export KMZ file with embedded photos

There is no way my mother could do this - but then again, my mother
isn’t running around with a GPS constantly on during her vacations
either.

I have many many opinions and observations on this subject of information and location but have not done much public writing in the past. This post was written on the fly but as I post more and more I will get a better sense of how to organize a post more coherently.  I hope if any bothers to read this that they stick with me.  The site will move soon in the future, but I am battling with host providers to release domains and things like that.  More fun with technology.

Download Morocco-May5.kmz (1293.8K)