I heard about this on a weekly tech podcast I listen to, and it recently came up on digg and it reminded me to write a little blurb about this on my blog.

Flickr Vision is a simple website that takes photos that are posted in flickr that have been geo tagged (gps data embedded into the photo) and displays them on a 2d or 3d map. Its pretty neat and you can find your self just watching the 3d version for quite some time. I do want to point out this isn’t real time, meaning that the photo posted could of been taken a day ago but someone just decided to add it to flikr, what is real time is when they add it.

anyhow head on over to Flickr Vision and check it out for your self. I prefer the 3d view personally.

I have been on the long quest for a great gps logger to carry around on my hikes and travels. I am a shutter bug by nature and on my last trip to Europe Took over 700+ photos and I would of taken more but my 8 gig memory card took a dive 2 day into the trip. Over the past 6 months I have tried out my combination of hardware and software solutions (original post) before finally buying a GiSTEQ logger to take on my trip to Europe with me. I originally saw a link on Engadget a few days before my trip and quickly contacted the company and ordered one.

My experiences with the GiSTEQ device was pretty positive over all but I did find one annoying factor and that was the time it takes to sync up with satellites and start logging data. Every day of our trip, I had to stand outside for what seemed like a few minutes for it to finally sync up, some times this was faster and im sure it was the various locations I was standing at that didn’t help. This is probably due to a lot of the tourist places are in locations where a lot of buildings tower over you. Now I don’t know that much about satellites but I’m guessing that was one of the issues.

The software that comes with the logger is still what I call it in the early stages, while it works most of the time it lacks a lot of the features that I use (Google earth/maps exporter). I have been in contact with them and they assure me they are working on versions to add some of the features that I use and as of the June 7th a new version is out but I haven’t had time to check it out yet.

Never fret though, You can export your gps logs to .nmea format and use software such as RoboGeo to take advantage of more features for geo tagging your photos such as export to Google Earth/Maps, Shape file, DXF file, Mapoint and many other options.

Their is a new gps logger in town I’m trying to get my hands on as well QSTARZ BT-Q1000 GPS which incorporates also bluetooth technology. The GiSTEQ is just a logger but the QSTARZ is both a logger and can be used with other mapping software for trip/route planning.

Over all i pretty happy with the GiSTEQ and as they improve the software I might use it more and more, but for $99 you cant beat the combo of hardware and software that comes at that price.

I took this was a little cool 3.9 mile hike a week ago which is close to Phoenix Lake in Ross, California (Marin). Most of the hike was shaded and only walked about a mile on a fire road before really getting into the Hidden Meadow area. This is a pretty simple hike and takes you around a cool little meadow area, the climb inst to bad either about a 600 foot elevation change.

One thing about this hike is it gave me great views of Mount Tamalpais. If your looking for an easy hike I would recommend this, but be aware the first mile on the fire road can be littered with mountain bikers but you shouldn’t find any on the trail once you get going.

Below are some is a screen cap of the hike, and of course the links below will lead you to the Google Maps and Google Earth viewable options.

These Links below will show my hike path along with photos taken during my hike.

• Hidden Meadow Hike in Google Maps with Photos
• Hidden Meadow Hike In Google Earth
• Free Google Earth Application

I’m just getting around to being able to blog about this new I took last Saturday. So far this is one of my favorites that I have done and gives you a nice degree of difficulty, elevation change and great scenery. The hike is hidden in Larksupr, California (Marin County) and is about 5.3 miles round trip if you take the trail I did. I found a great book of 141 hikes for my local area, which also allows you to download the maps in PDF format and print them so you don’t have to carry the actual book around.

Baltimore Canyon (A15 hike in the book) starts out in a really nice redwood tree area and slowly climbs up to Blithedale Ridge where you can see great views of the bay and Mount Tamalpais. When I went it wasn’t to crowded which is good but I did run into a little friend (Banana Slug) slowly going across my trail. Check out Picture 42 and 43 of my hike to see.

I have exported my photos and GPS coordinates into Google maps which you can see below. You can zoom in or select a red push pin to see a thumb of a photo and clicking on the thumb shows your a full screen image. These Images are taken directly where they found in the map. I usually carry a GPS logger and my camera around to log my hikes.

Baltimore Canyon Hike

Click here for a larger view of my hike along Baltimore Canyon.

Another cool thing is if you have the Free Google Earth viewer you can download my trip here for Google Earth.

“Google Earth combines the power of Google Search with satellite imagery, maps, terrain and 3D buildings to put the world’s geographic information at your fingertips.”

This weekend I went on a great hike with some friend of mine and decided to put all my gps gadget stuff to use. With my gps, camera, camel pack and hiking shoes I was off to a great hike in Marin, California. Its a small 3 mile hike with various terrain and not to much difficulty. I snapped a few photos, most of them are just of the hills in Deer Park but the cool thing about all this is I now have gps data of the exact locations where I took my photos and as you can see below I placed them in google maps. Clicking on a red push pin pulls up a thumb of the photo and clicking on that image brings up the full images in another window.

I also put together a full sized map of the hike with the photos here.

I plan on doing this on most hikes and hopefully next time ill write a bit more descriptions about the photos and locations.

UPDATE: Found a nice self contained unit that replaces the Pocket PC, and Bluetooth gps receiver, more information at the bottom of the post.

I have been wanting to set this up for some time and recently found a combination of hardware and software that work for me. What is this all about you ask? Well let me shed some light on this. Geo photo, coding, or what ever you want to call it, is the ability to write GPS data to jpeg EXIF headers. This text data is stored in the header of a jpeg adding the longitude, latitude and altitude you took your photo at.

You can do this a few ways, first of all you can buy a camera with built in gps (as of this time they are still pretty low quality), buy a hand held gps device that stores (waypoint, GPX, NMEA data) or a combination of devices. I have chosen the latter because I had a few piece of hardware already. Most if not all devices export out to some data format the one I choose is NMEA data since it works with the software im using on my PC.

My hardware setup consists of:

• Pocket PC with built in bluetooth
• Canon SD900 10 mega pixel camera
• i-Blue 737 bluetooth gps.

and the software im using:

• Navio for the Pocket PC
• RoboGeo for my PC

So how do you make this all work?
Well in theory you connect your gps to your pocket pc via bluetooth launch the Navio software, start it’s gps logging option which can record every few seconds your location to a file and then take your photos.

After your done taking photos its time to do the magic on your PC. First transfer over the log file that Navio created on your Pocket PC to your PC and also save any photos you took during this process to your PC as well. I just created a temp folder on my pc where i put both log file and photos together. Next you launch the RoboGeo application and follow the 3 easy steps to Geo coding your photos.

One very important thing before doing all of this is to sync up the time on your gps, pocket pc and camera to the same time and date. This is a key factor and if you don’t do this your location of where you took photos can be off by quite a bit.

The cool thing about RoboGeo is that it can also save your photos to your flickr account and generate links for you that when the user clicks on your photo they can see the location you were at (Google Earth, Google Maps,). There are also plenty of other export options you can do once you have embedded the longitude and latitude into your photos.

Of course this is a very quick crash course, but you can imagine the possibilities that can be done with this data in your jpeg files. Here is a link to a sample I did this weekend while testing out this whole process. Take special note to the links below the photo, clicking on one of them will show you the location of where I took this photo. If you use the Google Earth link you will need the free application installed first.

Once I get more time I’ll take more and post them on my filckr account and in my photo section of my blog as I get time.

UPDATE: Ok after surfing around for a single unit that records NMEA data which is used in RoboGeo to geo code your photos I found the Sony GPS-CS1 which is a very small device that you can clip on your belt and take your photos. This will replace the hardware I have listed above in the post, so no need for a Pocket PC, external bluetooth GPS. The Cost of this device is about $100 from Amazon.com. Read a small review of this device here.