Geotagging with 5d Mark iii?

[anewman143]

I see that Canon sells the GP-E2 for geotagging, but read that it produces a file in NMEA format and not GPX...I use Aperture (at least until I see Photos and decide if LR6 is for me) and it requires GPX...

Are there any Mac utilities to convert NMEA to GPX for Mac OS X? How well do they work? Hard to get the data from the GP-E2 to the Mac? (figured a usb cable, but saw something about it being more complicated that just plugging in)

Anyway - looking for anyone with experience with this...I really like having the ability to automatically geotag and not have to carry my Garmin around my neck

 

[MCAsan]

Canon makes a GPS accessory that plugs into the hotshoe on 5DIII. Had one and it worked just fine.

 

[anewman143]

MCAsan - thanks for the quick reply. I am aware of the Canon product (as I wrote) but was concerned with the file format that it produced for GPS logs as opposed to just geotagging individual photos.

But it is VERY good to hear that it works well for you - that's a +1

Best

Adam

 

[MCAsan]

I would never make an equipment decision based on the limitations of a product like Aperture that had a End of Sales announced. Select and implement the replacement DAM, then make the GPS equipment decision accordingly.

From what I have seen in the Photos beta I have....complete waste of time as it is far closer to iPhoto than to Aperture. Of course we all want to see LR6.

 

[anewman143]

MCAsan - absolutely right...didn't mean to imply that Aperture was my long-term solution...and from what I've been reading, photos ain't it either...

LR6 is likely where I'll find myself...not looking forward to that transition at all, from learning a new interface/workflow, etc.

Is LR6 expected to show geotagged info in it? (Forgive my ignorance...been using Aperture for years now)

 

[rebby]

Canon makes a GPS accessory that plugs into the hotshoe on 5DIII. Had one and it worked just fine.

The Canon GP-E2 is also what I use for both my 5d3 and 1dx and it works great. Also works well w/the 7d (using the USB connection, probably the hot shoe w/the 7d2, can't say for sure).

As far as translating from the NMEA file to a GPX, you're not the first one that I've heard ask about this. There is a thread on POTN where the OP (and others) was striving for something like this as well. It may be worth a read and, potentially, a follow up to one of those guys. Some of the guys involved in the thread were extremely knowledgeable in the area of geomatics arena.

Please let us know if you do come up with a NMEA -> GPX solution. I've heard the question asked enough times now that I'm curious to know the answer myself. Good luck!

 

[MCAsan]

MCAsan - absolutely right...didn't mean to imply that Aperture was my long-term solution...and from what I've been reading, photos ain't it either...

LR6 is likely where I'll find myself...not looking forward to that transition at all, from learning a new interface/workflow, etc.

Is LR6 expected to show geotagged info in it? (Forgive my ignorance...been using Aperture for years now)

LR5 read my tagged files from 5DIII just fine. I suggest you look at the LR5 info. I have not read of anything significant that LR6 will handle beyond the MAP module that is in LR5.

 

[robgendreau]

LR 5 can do geolocating. Pretty similar to Aperture 3.6.

As you've discovered they want GPX. Also, if you wish to either fine tune the location or don't have GPS data, the maps are rather lame depending on what you do. Google's maps eg don't have much trail info; I like Open Street Map better for that.

I'd recommend HoudahGeo. It's much easier to geo reference than Aperture or LR IMHO. And it incorporates GPSBabel, which is an open source converter. You can just get the converter, but it's not super user friendly if you don't know GPS well. HoudahGeo can import NMEA data, or GPX, or Google Earth or CSV or others. And it can use Open Street Map.

Further, HoudahGeo can look inside LR catalogs or Aperture libraries to find the photos you want to geolocate. And do reverse geolocation. And it has various options for writing the info to files; geotags can be written right into RAWs or as sidecars. It specializes in geolocations so it's obviously more capable.

Frankly, I dunno why someone would buy a camera company GPS. Not only are they uber expensive, and of limited use, but they often have very old GPS hardware inside, so they are very slow to acquire, poor performers in cover, hard to manage, and battery hogs (some on your camera). I used a standalone unit that performed so much better.

These days, however, I use my iPhone or other mobile device. I think the best app for this is gps4cam. Amazing. The really nice thing is you can go manual, and mark when you take a shot by shaking the phone, or use a track. But it can space out the track points it collects and hence save battery life. You just take a picture of a QR code it generates and use that to geocode; no need to transfer files. You do that with either their app, or my preference, HoudahGeo. It will find the QR Code in your folder of picture, you click it, and bingo, it has all the photos coded. Really magical.

EDIT: Houdah makes a freebie front end for GPSBabel to do conversions only; it's called HoudahGPS and you can get it here: http://www.houdah.com/free/

 

[jc1350]

Until I can replace my aging Canon 30D, I use a phone app called PixTrack that creates a GPX log and stores it on my Dropbox account. It uses the time the photo was taken to match the coordinates and Lightroom and Aperture both apply them easily.

The only difficulty is making sure the camera's time is set to match the phone and even that can be fixed after the fact when applying the GPX track. With PixTrack there is no additional software needed.