Microsoft releases geotagging tool

01May08

I’ve been looking around for a way to easily geotag my photos. I already have a GPS (a GlobalSat DG-100) to periodically store the the GPS location as I travel (I might write about it in some future article), but have not found (and I haven’t tried hard enough to find) a good solution to geotag the shots.

Likely seeing “thar’s gold in them thar hills”, Microsoft recently released a geotagging tool, called Pro Photo Tools, based on MSN Virtual Earth. While I haven’t tried it, the description seems similar to what is provided through Google’s Picasa, which uses Google Earth. The nice thing is that it has support for some RAW formats right off the bat. What I’m wondering is if it modifies the metadata directly so can be used by Lightroom, or if it writes out to its own side file, like Picasa does, which doesn’t help my usage of Lightroom.

I’ll give it a run, but I’m not certain this is what I’m looking for the GPS aspects. Still, for those that do not have a GPS already, want to easily geotag your photos, and is using Windows, this might be a viable solution.

Beyond just handling the GPS aspect of it, it also provides capabilities to edit metadata, ala ExifTool + ExifTool GUI.

Filed under: Photography   |  1 Comment
Tags: EXIF, geotagging, GPS, metadata, software