Geo Tagging

Hi to everyone,
Bit new to all this so apologises if this thread has been sorted or the language is a bit basic. I currently have an EOS 1 Ds MkIII with a WFT2A and I'm looking at geo tagging my images. Canon recommended a Garmin GPSmap which I brought only to find it wouldn't connect through the USB. Is anyone successfully running this camera with a GPS unit, if so which one. Thanks in advance

Geez, 10 hours and no answers. I don't have any answers either, but I'm interested in the subject.

Welcome to POTN, Matt. We're not ignoring you, but it sounds like nobody knows...

-js

I don't know either but I would like to know how well it works out in the end. I've got an older Garmin Legend (serial connection) and would love to find a way to add GPS coord's to pictures we take while Geocaching.

Jon.

Mattarowley wrote in post #7309514
Hi to everyone,
Bit new to all this so apologises if this thread has been sorted or the language is a bit basic. I currently have an EOS 1 Ds MkIII with a WFT2A and I'm looking at geo tagging my images. Canon recommended a Garmin GPSmap which I brought only to find it wouldn't connect through the USB. Is anyone successfully running this camera with a GPS unit, if so which one. Thanks in advance

Sorry I can't answer your question because I have a 40D and have to do the tagging at the time of downloading.

Jon Foster wrote in post #7313643
I don't know either but I would like to know how well it works out in the end. I've got an older Garmin Legend (serial connection) and would love to find a way to add GPS coord's to pictures we take while Geocaching.

Jon.

I too had an older Garmin with only the serial connection and I could never get it to work in tagging my images. I finally bought a better mapping unit with a USB connection (when the old one crapped out) and I now am able to tag my images when I download them from the card.

What I have done is set the GPS unit up to record tracks to the internal Micro SD card the unit has. When I'm ready to download, I plug in the GPS and set it to show the card as a drive on the computer. I then plug in the camera CF card, via a reader, and download my images using DownloaderPro from Breeze Systems. DLPro reads the track logs on the GPS, compares the time stamp of the log to the camera time stamp and if they agree, codes the geographical coordinates into an xmp sidecar file in the same folder as the RAW image.

Since I use Lightroom for most of my processing, the coordinates are automatically included with the rest of the EXIF when I export the images as jpegs after processing. I just set up a section on my SmugMug that automatically shows the locations of images that have geographical information included.

This entire process was done pretty much by trial and error because Garmin is not forthcoming with important information in their product manuals. Such as, nowhere does it say that the information is recorded on the Micro SD card in Universal (Greenwich Mean) time. I couldn't get the camera and GPS to agree until I realized this and applied the proper time zone offset in DownloaderPro. (There's an eight hour difference between UT and where I live.)

Thanks to everyone for the advice. I'm in the process of chatting with Canon and Garmin. Canon claim it can be done so I might just drop it on their door step and leave them with the headache! If I make any headway I'll let you know.

I've read a few places that the geotagging functionality doesn't work as advertised, but have no first hand experience. For the cost of the accessory I have no problem tagging my stuff when im moving files to my computer =/

I use a Merax Photo Finder RAW which consists of a small, dedicated gps receiver and software.

It requires you to sync up the camera and gps time. The receiver is left on for the day's shooting in a place where it can get signal.

End of day, download the photos and the gps data (through supplied software), it matches them and applies the location data to the EXIF.

Very accurate if the time is matched to the second.

You can use any gps receiver you have already in the same way, there are a number of free and shareware solutions to sync them, do a search on geotagging software.

I just tried the Merax site and my anti-virus freaked out. Anyone else?

Mattarowley wrote in post #7309514
Hi to everyone,
Bit new to all this so apologises if this thread has been sorted or the language is a bit basic. I currently have an EOS 1 Ds MkIII with a WFT2A and I'm looking at geo tagging my images. Canon recommended a Garmin GPSmap which I brought only to find it wouldn't connect through the USB. Is anyone successfully running this camera with a GPS unit, if so which one. Thanks in advance

I assume you are looking for a way to geotag your images in realtime. I have not heard of a way to do that.

Canon was probably thinking you would use the track log created by the GPSmap to merge the geo data into your images with a program like RoboGEO which can be found at http://www.robogeo.com​/home/

There are other free programs that do the merge in batch mode like RoboGEO but I don't recall the names at this time. All the merge programs require that you sync your camera time with the GPS instruments time to achieve accuracy of the tagging.

The batch method requires that I transfer the track log from the GPS instrument to my computer. It only takes a few minutes once you figure out what needs to be done.

No, that's not what Canon thought.
A GPS like Garmin's GPSmap 60 CSx can connect to a WFT-E2 (1D camera Mark III) or WFT-E3 (40D/50D) or WFT-E4 (5D Mark II). It's a hefty expense to get that functionality, but you can do it.

Note that the WFT device has a USB host port. Hence the GPS must have a USB connection as well. The GPSmap 60 units are kind of Swiss army knives for navigation, so they have all sorts of bells and whistles. Obviously, you must use the USB port on the GPS. More recent units, like the GPSmap 60 CSx, also features a card reader inside the GPS. It's possible to let that navigator present itself to the host as a card reader, but if you set it up like that, it will not work for geotagging. If you have one of these, make sure that under Setup/Interface the GPS shows that USB is connected and that the USB memory stick mode is not selected.
Then it should work, provided that you on the camera has set the external USB device to be a GPS, not a storage device.
I don't know for sure, but if you want to use an even newer model, like the Colorado or Oregon, you can probably get that to work if you force the GPS interface into the so called Spanner mode. It would be interesting to hear if anyone have had success with that?

Note that older models, like the GPSmap 76, does not have any USB port. They support (sort of) RS 232 only, so they are not useful for this purpose.

russ_hillis wrote in post #7986918
I just tried the Merax site and my anti-virus freaked out. Anyone else?

I just went there, site did not load properly. Worse, I had some weird stuff happening on my laptop afterwards.

W32 worm, stay away from that site. It took me hours to get the infection off the hard drive.

Has anyone used the Dawn Technology products ?
http://www.dawntech.hk​/di-GPS/products.htm

The Di-GPS seems like a no brainer for Nikon, but for Canon you need to spend a fortune on the wireless unit in order to use these products . at least as far as I know.

I'd really like to geo tag my landscape shots, but it would have to be an easy and affordable solution.

I guess Canon's design simply doesn't lend itself to interface with these real time GPS encoders.