Geotagging photos for Flickr with Mac OS X and a Garmin GPS

My photos from my bike club group ride and Ichetucknee River tubing adventure over the weekend were my first successful integration of photography, my recently-acquired GPS unit, and my quest for adventure.

Here’s the toolkit:

• A Flickr account, naturally.
• A digital camera, in this case it was my everything-proof Olympus Stylus 770 SW. This also works with RAW files from my Canon Digital Rebel XSi.
• A GPS unit, such as my Garmin GPSmap 76CSx.
• Garmin’s RoadTrip software for Mac OS X.
• GPSPhotoLinker by Jeffrey J. Early.

Here’s the procedure:

• Synchronize your camera’s time with the GPS unit’s time.
• Take your powered-on GPS unit with you on an adventure. Garmin makes a nice handlebar mount for mine. I also have a boat mount that I plan to put in the kayak. For the tubing, I put it in my dry bag that I took along.
• When you get home, download the photos from the camera to your Mac.
• Using RoadTrip, download your GPS track to your computer and edit the track as necessary. I copy my edited track to its own folder in RoadTrip. Export the folder from RoadTrip, creating a GPX file.
• Open GPSPhotoLinker and load the track and the photos. Use the “View on map” button to preview the position online in Google Maps (the default, others are available). I mostly found myself using the “Time weighted average point.” When you are satisfied with how things are looking, use the “Save to photo” button to write the geographic info into the metadata of the photo file. A batch mode is also available.
• Before uploading to Flickr, You need to set the Import EXIF location data setting in your profile to “Yes.” I don’t know why Flickr doesn’t have a “This photo contains geographic data, do you want to use it?” option when you click, “Add to your map,” but for now, it will only automatically use the data on upload.
• Upload your images to Flickr. If you are editing the images first, make sure you don’t save them with a method that discards the metadata.
• Sit back and enjoy your mapped photos. Here are mine.