Blog

Geotagging Photos

2011-02-22 08:48:11 - Photography

Since I am always going out to different parks and nature areas and wanted a way to geotag my photos, but not pay a whole lot or have to buy and carry more stuff to do it. I found a pretty good solution that works with the equipment I already have:

• First you need to have a digital camera (of course).
• An iPhone or iPod Touch that has GPS capability.
• MotionX-GPS Lite (free) or MotionX-GPS ($0.99)
• GeoSetter (free) Win XP and higher.

The MotionX-GPS Lite version only allows one track, so if you are out and want to record more than one track, it is well worth the $0.99 to pay for the full version where you can save up to 10 tracks.

What I do is start up the MotionX-GPS software and start a new track at the beginning of the trail that I'm about to head out on. I also make sure that the date and time on my camera are correct (this is how it matches up the location with the photo). When I am done with my photo tour I save that track and send it to my email, which requires some sort of 3G or WiFi connection. When I copy all my photos to my computer I put the two files that I sent to myself in the same folder, then run the GeoSetter software and have it create XMP sidecar files that store the location data.

There is other software out there, but I haven not tried them yet. I will look into doing a comparison of different ways in the future.

Browsers and HTML5

2011-01-25 15:56:31 - Web

In an effort to create an HTML5 Web App that is viewable across multiple mobile platforms as well as on standard browsers, I've come to the conclusion that you just have to draw a line in the digital sand somewhere. I have an iPhone 4 (love it) and have several family/friends that use Android, and a couple that have BlackBerry. Thanks to a great site that helps to determine the level of HTML5 compatibilty (html5test.com) for what ever browser hits it, I've learned these are my benchmarks for mobile devices (in order from best to worst HTML5 compatibility):

• BlackBerry v6
• iOS 4.X
• Android 2.X
• iOS 3.X

For desktop browsers these all work (in order of best to worst HTML5 compatibility):

• Google Chrome 8
• Safari 5
• Opera 10 & 11
• Firefox 3.6
• SeaMonkey 2
• IE 9

It's really surpising the lack of HTML5 support that IE has. Version 8 is very poor, and anything below that just isn't working. There were several other browsers that I tested but their HTML5 compatibility was very poor at best. Now, they still display pages written in HTML5 for the most part until you start utilizing some of the HTML5 specific tags and features. We can only hope that the number of people using older browswer goes down quickly or their viewing experience will be next to non-existant.