Curious.Judith

Today’s installment from macmap (Macintosh Mapping and GPS Group) had a notice about HoudahGeo 1.4.12 release, in turn from MacInTouch.com. I have a few projects from July where i’ve photos and my GPS tracks, and i’ve been experimenting with using iShowU to record the GoogleEarth animation to include in a slide show. So, i’m ready to play with HoudaGeo.

I imported my three hundred plus whale watching photos (from our great Sanctuary Cruises trip) into HoudahGeo. That took noticeable time, but wasn’t long enough to get distracted. Then i imported the tracklog in GPX format (after a quick conversion with MacGPS Pro). HoudahGeo has a function to import from the GPS , but i did not test that. A quick prompt to verify whether there was time difference in the camera, and voila, a lat long for every image. I’ll note that the interpolation wasn’t well tested in this experiment, but it sufficiently automates what one would do without the code. Most importantly, the software is very easy to use. There’s an opportunity to title and write descriptions within the HoudahGeo interface, and since the application makes standard sidecar files or (presumably) will produce new EXIF data, i find that more appealing than creating image data in iPhoto.

Exporting, with the trial limitation of three images per project, was straightforward as well. (Note that the second image i exported wasn’t the nice image of the Risso’s Dolphins i expected. Pout.) My note about “presumably” above is because i produced sidecar XMP files the first time round, and my subsequent change of configuration did not rewrite the image with edited exif. Bug or limitation of trial or user error are all possible explanations.

The Flickr export went well, although i’m disappointed to find Flickr’s map doesn’t import the geolocation tags.

The win is, in my opinion, the kmz export option. Viewing in Google Earth is very pleasant, and it’s a format one can share with others. If you have a place to host your kmz file, you can give folks the URL and they the photos and the track in Google Earth: houdahgeotest.kmz (248 kb). Note that the time line function in Google Earth is supported! With a hosted location, i was also able to import the kmz into my maps at Google Maps. I’m not sure why there’s an offset between the trail and the red dots. If Google Maps is your destination for the images, it looks like you should edit the kmz in GoogleEarth (or your KMZ editor) before posting. Still, it’s a neat way to put your images in a place. I admit that the “featureless” ocean surface may not be the best example of this; the track over the USGS relief map of the Monterey Canyon gives the whale’s view of where we were.

People who looked at this item also looked at…

• Data conversion issues: GPX to shapefiles (episode 5)
• Playing with the GPS: Exploring Mt Lassen (episode 4)
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Tags: Bug, EXIF, Exporting, Flickr's, Google, google earth, Google Maps, GoogleEarth, gps, GPS Group, GPX, HoudaGeo, Houdahgeo, I'll, I'm, If Google Maps, Image, Imported, iPhoto, iShowU, July, KMZ, MacGPS Pro, Macintosh Mapping, MacInTouch, mapping, Monterey Canyon, Note, Pout, Risso's Dolphins, Sanctuary Cruises, The Flickr, There's, Today's, URL, USGS, View Larger Map, Viewing, XMP

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 9th, 2008 at 10:16 am and is filed under GPS and GIS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.