Phone Friday: Adobe Lightroom's map feature and your phone

One of my favorite features of Adobe Lightroom 4 is the map module. What a great way to organize information. Many new model cameras have built in gps receivers so the images are automatically geo tagged. But how do you find locations if you have a camera (like the 5D MK III that I use) without the gps chip?

My solution is to shoot a picture with my camera phone after I am done shooting with the MK III. It doesn't have to be a good picture. I am just trying to record the location. Any phone with a camera will have a built in gps receiver that tags the photograph. I then email that photo to myself. When I download the days shoot I'll drop those emailed photos into the same folder on my computer that I am downloading my raw files into.

Then when I import the day's folder into lightroom the phone pictures will appear on the lightroom map. From there it is a simple matter of dragging the raw files onto the right place on the map. Lightroom will even fill in the correct city, state and country. 

By doing that to the raw files at import any files I then export will have the correct information in them.

Of course there are add on gps receivers for cameras (here is one for the MK III). But you have to remember to put them on the camera, and often I need something else to go into the hot shoe (like a flash). Plus it is one more thing to buy and carry when I almost always have a phone on me.

Below is Adobe's explanation of the map module.

 

Stephen Alvarez

Comments

[Guglielmo Paoletti]

I do exactely the same :)

[D]

I'm using a cheap GPS logger called i-gotU that I throw on the dashboard of my care or tie to my backback when traveling. Memory lasts for days when logging one position per minute. The battery lasts for at least 24h hours of logging and can be charged using a USB cable. But any device that can export its log as GPX will do.

Lightroom's map module has a function to load the GPX track file and then geo-tag selected photos according to capture time.

[Daniel Cdms]

Hi!

Here are two interesting products, I've read that they work really fine, and the battery works quite fine.
http://www.qstarz.com/Products/GPS%20Products/BT-Q1000XTM-F.htm
http://www.qstarz.com/Products/GPS%20Products/BT-Q1000EXQR-F.htm

The only problem is that you have to carry with you all the time :S