I bought a Pharos Trips and Pics, which is a GPS location tagger, and installed the software (Pharos Trips & Pics Version 1.7.0.0). The Trips & Pics is a great travel GPS tracker and a digital camera add-on. It recorded my trips and geotagged my photos offline by using the time stamp of the photos. (Note: Digital camera's clock must be calibrated against some accurate time source. The GPS gadget provides the most accurate time.) It also supports EXIF, Flickr and GPX. This is a picture opened with Adobe Bridge to see the extra EXIF Metadata include GPS Latitude, Longitude and Map Datum
Pharos Trips & Pics is a low-cost solution for recording trips and geotagging photos, ideal for leisure travelers, photographers, outdoor enthusiasts, field workers, real estate agents, conservationists, fleet managers... The applications of the product are limited only by your imagination.
Figure 1 shows a typical usage cycle of Trips & Pics.
- You connect the receiver to your home computer with the USB cable or dongle, and use the Trips & Pics program to enable GPS logging.
- You remove the receiver from the computer, plug it into the battery dock and take the package with you on your trip. Make sure your battery dock is fully charged.
- During the trip you may take photos with any digital camera. You control when to log position data with the power switch on the battery dock. Once coming back from your trip, you unplug the receiver from the battery dock.
- You connect the receiver to your home computer, copy photos from your camera to the computer, and run the Trips & Pics program to geotag the photos and generate trips files. You can then at any time view the result on your computer with Google Earth or Microsoft Virtual Earth, or you can share the result with your friends online.
There are two different user interface modes in Trips & Pics, Express mode and Classic mode. Express mode has a prettier, and much easier user interface. It is designed with novice users in mind. With this mode you can accomplish most common tasks with minimum effort. In fact, it is possible that you can connect your receiver, download log data from it, generate trips files, launch Google Earth or Virtual Earth and view result - all in just one single click. Because of the nature of the Express mode, only a subset of features and options is exposed. For advanced features you will need to switch to the Classic mode, which again is just one click away.
With Trips & Pics, in the Classic mode, you can geotag your photos and write GPS location data to their EXIF headers. Once you upload these photos to a photo sharing website such as Flickr, Picasa or Locr, the website can extract the location data from EXIF headers and put your photos on a map.
These are the screen shots that I uploaded the pictures to Picasa Web Albums. Picasa auto-detected the pictures are embedded with GPS location info in EXIF. Press "Yes" in the "Map your photo", then the pictures would linked with map. Very cool.
