Recently, I have been experimenting with geotagging my photographs.  First of all I need to be able to log the GPS data but unfortunately I have not been able to find a sensibly pricing option for Canon.  In the end, I opted for a standalone GPS logger from AMOD, AGL3080 GPS Photo Tracker.  This of course means that I have to adapt my workflow to synchronise the GPS data to the photo image files.

There are a number of software choices for getting the GPS data into the image file metadata but I really don’t want to complicate my workflow any further than necessary.  My post processing and library management is focused around Adobe’s Lightroom so ideally a GPS plugin to Lightroom would be ideal.  As luck as it, Jeffrey Friedl has written a good plugin to achieve this, Jeffrey’s "GPS-Support" Geoencoding Plugin for Lightroom.

It has taken me a little while to figure out how to use this plugin effectively so I will try to share me experiences over a few blogs on Geotagging.  Assuming that you have downloaded Jeffrey’s plugin, there are two other pieces of software you will problem want … (i) GPSBabel to convert the GPS logs into the required format – don’t worry you only have to tell Jeffrey’s plugin where this software is installed and (ii) Google Earth (optional – you can see where you took your photos).

So you have Jeffrey’s plugin and GPSBabel installed, now what to you do?

Select ALL the photos you want to geotag and then start Jeffrey’s plugin – you will need the Tracklog tab and select the required GPS tracklog file (which you will have downloaded from your GPS logger.  The next step is simple … click the “Geoencode Image” button on the plugin.  This will find the appropriate GPS data for each image and write this to a “Shadow Copy”.  This “Shadow Copy” is not held in the RAW file or associated XMP sidecar (I’ll get to how to make that happen in a future blog).  Now these photographs should have associated GPS coordinates.

Next blog I will cover how to get location data from the GPS coordinates …

A month ago, I blogged about Gleb Budman’s interesting blog about backing up photos whilst travelling.  Now Gleb has followed up with additional information about various options that he was offered and it is worth reading Backing up photos while traveling – feedback | Backblaze Blog.

Adobe have released updates for Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) 6.2 and Lightroom 3.2 today – note that Lightroom have skipped a version number to align the version numbering of these two products given that they contain updates for the same things.  There are an additional 120 lens profiles in this release which now includes all my current lenses.

The other new feature is direct publishing to Facebook rather than requiring a third party add-in.  I have try this yet as I have only just installed Lightroom 3.2 and now have to go to work so it will have to wait until later.

I have been making some minor improvements and fixing some bugs with my web site … as always it has seemed to have taken longer than I had expected.  I guess that I should know better by now.

The most important change has been to rebuild all the galleries with Matthew Campagna’s latest version of TTG Highslide Gallery Pro. This is one of the best Lightroom plug-ins for building web sites so check it out at The Turning Gate’s web site.  In this release of TTG Highslide Gallery Pro, there is improved support for mobile devices so hopefully this will make my web site easily to navigate on these devices.

Other changes include ensuring all external links open in a new windows or tab (depending how you configure your browser) and correcting the odd typo in the gallery text & photo descriptions.

Unfortunately, there are no new photographs … I now have to go out and shoot some more as I have cleared the post processing backlog – this is great news as I can get back behind the camera!

This is a problem that I have been facing for some time and the amount of data that I have is just growing with every shoot … the joys of a 21 megapixel camera.  So I looked around for an online backup solution that is both reliable and affordable but didn’t seem to be able to find one.  Then one day I was listening to one of the many photo podcasts that I follow and a company called Backblaze who offer unlimited backup all for US$ 5 /month per computer.

It has been several months since I have subscribed to Backblaze and I am backing up my main PC with all my photographic library on plus my laptop.  The Backblaze software runs silently and effectively in the background without interfering with your use of the computer.  The initial backup takes a while (depends on how much data you have & your internet connectivity) but once this is done then the Backblaze software just figures out new & modified files and backups them up in the background.

As always with backups, it is a good idea to test a restore before you need it so you are sure that the backup is working.  On this front, I have to say it was very easy and quick to restore a group of files as well as individual files.  In the event of an absolute disaster, Backblaze can restore your data to a USB drive and then ship that to you … an option I hope I never need but it is really good to know it is there.

Congratulations on a great service to all the team at Backblaze and keep up the good work.

I have been waiting for along time for Adobe to upgrade Lightroom.  First we had Apple releasing Aperture 3 (no good for us PC folk) and the Adobe looked like they might have been releasing it with Adobe CS5 but it turned out to only be a second beta.  Anyway, on Tuesday evening (at least here in UK) finally slipped Lightroom 3 out of the door. I have taken the opportunity to purchase both upgrades to Lightroom 3 and Photoshop CS5 Extended so I could claim the 30% discount on Lightroom – pity the discount wasn’t the other way round.

As always there is lots to get your head round so I have started by focusing on the new noise reduction processes which everyone has been raving about during the beta.  From the RAW processing that I have done tonight, it is a massive improvement over the previous Lightroom.  I definitely need to find some photos I have shot at high ISO (preferably 1600 ISO) to really test it out but that will have to wait until the weekend.

The way that you can upgrade whole collections to the new processing is also very good and much less time consuming than I expected.  So I have converted all my galleries but exporting and publishing them all is going to have to wait until Saturday otherwise I will be up all night … not for the first time either.

At the weekend, Helen and I took a trip down the River Thames to Greenwich.  The weather was perfect and it really felt like spring has arrived.  As always there seems to be loads to do after shooting – I have imported all my photos into Adobe Lightroom and have made the initial selection.

Now I have to make any adjustments that are necessary which I hope will be minimal but that depends on how good I was with the camera.  I don’t like to do much other than to make minor adjustments so that the image looks like I remember it!

On the software front, I am still waiting for Adobe to release Lightroom 3 which has a bunch of cool new features including better noise reduction which will be great for low light photography.  Yesterday saw the release of Adobe CS5 which has a mind-blowing number of different products and appears to be as expensive as ever.