Global Graffiti: Geotagging Photos from GPX files

I often find myself reconstructing a trip by looking back through the unedited pictures. It could be stuff like random shots out the window of a moving car or gas stations, stuff that wouldn’t make an album or blog post, but they help refresh the memories of the trip and recreate it in my mind. And now that we’re using our GPS to navigate, the track logs it automatically stores are a great way to get an overview of the route. So why not have the best of both worlds? Use the GPS tracks to geotag the photos and be able to see all the memories exactly where they happened on the route.

Converting GPS Tracks to Routes to view in Google Maps

For the ADVODNA GPS Track Viewer to display tracks recorded by our GPS (a Zumo 660) or for them to be be viewed in any other Google Maps-based app, tracks need to be converted to routes. The Google API only understands Routes, not Tracks. To do this, I use a very handy little program called GPSBabel. 

Settings:

Input File: 2010-04-15 Baja Tracks.gpx
Format: GPX XML

Filters –> Miscellaneous –> Transform: Tracks –> Routes: Check “delete” (removes tracks from converted file)

Filters –> Routes & Tracks –> Simplify: Limit to 1000 Points (note: each point seems to be about 1kb of resulting file size)

Output File: 2010-04-15 Baja Converted Routes.gpx
Format: GPX XML

Converted file looks like this:

2010-04-15 Baja Converted Routes.gpx

Find out about new blog posts via Twitter, Facebook or RSS

I just spent a little too much time figuring out how to beat the social networking world into submission. Do I set up a Facebook group or fan page? Do I update from Facebook to Twitter or Twitter to Facebook? Or from Blogger to Twitter or Blogger to Facebook? Or Faceblog to Twitbook? 

In the end, here’s how we set it up. Windows Live Writer (or any editor) posts to Blogger which publishes an RSS feed that is picked up by TwitterFeed which posts it to our Facebook fan page and Twitter account. Of course, people can also just subscribe to the RSS feed directly if they are prone to that kind of thing. So if you’re interested, check out the side bar on the web site and click the one you want. And yes, Mom, I will figure out a way to do an update by plain old email as well…

And, by the time I figured out how to do all this and had sent 20 test posts, we already had a follower (thanks, Walker).

We went white

After spending some time reading through recent posts and referring to sites like those in our Other Travelers section for info, Ann made the proclamation that while she preferred the look of the black background with light text for the blog, black text on white was just easier to read. She may have been implying that my writing was making her head hurt, but I took it as a request to flip the color scheme. Despite extensive customization of our template, Google’s Blogger platform makes this pretty easy to do and within a half hour or so we had the new format you see now. Better?

ADVODNA GPS Track Viewer

We’ve already established that I’m a little geeky. I think taking way too many pictures and videos and recording GPS tracks is fun and I’ve found it very helpful in planning this trip when other people have done the same. With that in mind, I started looking the other day into how to display GPS information stored in .gpx files in Google Maps.

A Google search came up with several samples of people doing similar things and I settled on this one to blatantly steal. In my own defense, there were several others with a lot of the same code which leads me to believe they all cannibalized a Google Maps API sample somewhere. I set out to build my own hybrid that did exactly what I wanted.