southern sierras

 

I had a great backpacking trip in the Southern Sierras (near Mt. Whitney in the John Muir Wilderness) a few weeks ago, and finally decided to see about getting some geocoded pics online.

Since I've been so spoiled with my eye-fi card, I'm not used to needing to manually geocode my pics.  Still, I had my trusty old GPS with me for the trip, and I figured it shouldn't be too hard.  Here's what I did:

  • Used GPS Babel to quickly export a .gpx of my tracks from the trip
  • Ran the gpsPhoto perl script to geocode my photos: 
./gphoto.pl  --gpsfile hike08.gpx--timeoffset 28800 --maxtimediff 3600 --dir ./hike_photos/
  • Note:  the time offset (in seconds) is because my camera and I are set to -8 hours from GMT, and the time diff allows my photos to be up to an hour off from the closest gps point.  This is because I sometimes hiked with with the gps off. 
  • Now that the photos were geocoded, I uploaded them to Flickr, and noticed they weren't automagically put on the map, because I had never enabled Flickr to accept geocoded Exif headers.  Easily solved.

 

Next, I wanted a nicer KML of my actual route.  For this, I used the GPS plugin for QGIS (requires GPS Babel), which made importing directly from my garmin surprisingly easy.  QGIS rocks!  After a little bit of editing/smoothing of my line, I used ogr2ogr to convert the saved shapefile to a kml.

 

Finally, I wanted my KML to show photo links as well.  I was thinking I would make a little Yahoo Pipes thing to get my KML from a photoset, but it looks like the lazyweb already took care this for me, so all I had to do was copy the resulting points into my route kml, and I was done.

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