(no subject)

[warthog9]

So I've been playing with lightroom, and been working on getting my gallery back up and running fully. I think I've got it basically done and have been pointing a lot of people at it but I'm not *quite* ready to link it to the webpage. So I've got a digitial photography management system - Check. I've got a good panoramic image processor - (Hugin - I pronounce it hug-in - it's logo looks like it's trying to hug me) - Check. Geographic information in photos so that you can build pretty google maps and the like - *screaching halt* - not so checked

So Really what I'm saying is I was playing with Gallery and noticed that there's a plugin to do nice pretty google maps things. So I got to thinking - "hey how can I add the GPS data back to my photos after the fact, this has got to be easy right?" Why is it whenever I think things like that I'm completely and utterly wrong usually?

So I started looking around trying to find some software to do what I wanted. After some head banging, a bunch of downloads and mucking with a sample photo set for a while I can now pronounce GeoSetter to be pretty darned good. Now there are those out there that will start screaming bloody murder about it being a Windows program, and me a Linux geek. Well, deal. I do all my photo processing in Windows, it's the sad truth but everything I've seen that's cross platform or open source, etc - doesn't cut it. It does genuinely sadden me, yes, but I don't have the time, knowledge or interest in writing that kind of software. That said GeoSetter does seem to run under WINE so that's at least one thing I don't need windows for ;-) (my photo management software does not sadly *shakes fist of doom*)

GeoSetter has a good solid interface, though the first thing I did was turn off the extraneous effects. I've got a dual core reasonably high-end athlon, 4G of ram (though windows can't use it all), and generally a darned beefy machine and it still chugged with those effects on, without it's pretty zippy. It uses google maps to let you select and apply the location if you don't have a gps log (which I don't, I might start looking into cheap gps units just to do that logging though) and it has a *lot* of options on how to deal with the writing of the tags, from writing it only in an xmp sidecar to actually filling back in the missing portions of the EXIF data. Now I'll be honest I haven't fully vetted how it does it's writes, but it does seemingly (if you don't just use sidecars) have to create a new file to get all the EXIF data right. It does however seem to do what I would expect, if the writing is a bit slow.

Something to keep in mind, I'm going to keep playing with it for now and see what I think of it later on.