PlaceTagger
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The iPhone 4 and a Mac on a photography trek
Until a recent trip up to Canyon de Chelly in Northeast Arizona, I hadn't fully realized just how important Apple products have become to my photo workflow. As I sat back to think about the number of ways that Apple has made my job behind the camera easier, I began to realize just how dramatically things have changed since I had a Canon film camera, a backpack full of lenses, and lots of Fuji film. First, let's talk about digital imaging. While Apple doesn't currently make a digital camera, in the old days, they made the Quicktake, which was one of the very first digital cameras on the market. Most of my images pass through Apple hardware and either Apple or third party software. I carry my MacBook Pro on my trips, and I download images from a CF card onto the desktop; I can browse through the images in Aperture or iPhoto. %Gallery-98032%
PlaceTagger answers the 'where was this picture taken?' question
I have a Canon 5D DSLR. It's a great camera, but one of the things I wished it had was an on-board GPS receiver to keep track of where my photos were taken. That would be especially nice since iPhoto and some other apps support reading location metadata embedded in the image.I've looked at some of the outboard units, like the Amod GPS Logger, but didn't really want to shell out the cash or carry an extra device. Of course, you can take geotagged photos with the built in camera on the iPhone, but they aren't going to match a dedicated high quality DSLR.Now there is a nice, fairly low cost solution that uses the iPhone you are probably already carrying. PlaceTagger [App Store link] keeps track of where you are from minute to minute, recording your latitude, longitude and altitude. When you unload your camera, an app running on your Mac finds your iPhone using Wi-Fi, and matches the time on the logger software to the time your images were taken. It then embeds the info into the image metadata. It may sound confusing, but it is pretty simple. When the Mac app launches, it asks you to locate your images, and make sure your iPhone has been found. Your images show up as thumbnails, and when you are ready the software associates the GPS location to each file. The files then display a map of where the image was taken, as well as the specific numerical lat, long and altitude info. When I looked at the information in iPhoto, I saw the above data as well as the city, county, state and country I was in. Cool. The app is on sale at an introductory price of $7.99US and that is a bargain compared to the outboard electronics packages you could buy. The developer is also doing a Windows version of the app for those that don't have a Mac. The Mac version requires Leopard, and of course an iPhone with GPS capability. Older iPhones will work, but the location won't be as accurate. The software also includes an Aperture plug-in, and can export the data as XML via email. Of course, this app won't work in the background in the current iPhone software, so if you get a call or have to do something else you'll have to restart the software and get a fresh GPS fix.All in all, these are a pair of clever applications. They worked as expected, and I liked the ability to see the photos I took with a displayed map and numerical location information all on my Mac.
