Sometimes it’s hard to tell what something is supposed to do. Microsoft released their GPS tagging, metadata handling software called Pro Photo Tools a few days back, and I introduced it here.
Since then, I’ve tried it out some to see how it worked, and even used the geotagged photos on Flickr and Zooomr while testing the photo hosting sites.
It’s not a revelation, but it seems to do what was advertised.
MS Pro Photo Tools main page
The image above shows what you get when you first start it up and drag and drop several photos into the tool. It has several categories to add/delete/modify location information, date time stamping (even correcting for incorrectly dated images by adjusting the dates by days/hours/minutes/seconds), copyright info, etc. These are the basic stuff you’d expect from a metadata tool. Unfortuntately, you can only modify what the tool allows you to do, unlike ExifTool.
As for geotagging images, it’s quite easy actually, once you get past the initial curve of learning the program. The Help didn’t help. It has a “Tagging Images with Location Data” topic that just showed
Sorry, the geotagging advisor is not available.
Maybe Microsoft needs to test the software a little more before releasing.
In the end, I found that after navigating the MSN Virtual Earth map to where the photo was taken, you just need to right click on the photo and “Set GPS Location for this image”. With that, the GPS is data is written directly to the metadata of the photo itself, and not just a sidecar XML file.
MS Pro Photo Tools geotagging
In the end, it works, but I fail to see the big deal about it since other better software, such as Picasa and ExifTool, already exists to cover these two areas. (see update below)
I understand that Microsoft is trying to make inroads into digital photography, but it needs to do more and more convincingly at that.
May 8 Update:
There are a few other features I failed to mention yesterday that I just thought of. One is that if you already have GPS data captured from a standalone GPS, you can use that to geotag your photos. It’s able to read NMEA, GPX, KML and log files. Another addition is that you can enter an address for a photo, and it’ll tag the photo based on the GPS coordinates of the address. Both of these are nice features.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t work on RAW files, which is a shame since it makes this tool rather useless for me as I mainly shoot RAW and would rather geotag the original RAW files. Also given that a large number of “Pro Photo”-graphers who shoot RAW, this seems like one feature that Microsoft should have enabled. Nevertheless, for those who mainly shoot JPEGs, this tool could be a useful part of your arsenal.
Filed under: Photography | 2 Comments
Tags: EXIF, GPS, metadata, Microsoft, software
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Photo Book
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nice review – i just checked it out myself and wrote about it – came to basically the same conclusions as you did. Although it now ’sort of’ supports RAW…(you can read but not write to PEF exif).
Heres’s a link to my conclusions:
http://www.footloosiety.com/2009/01/microsoft-pro-photo-tools-review.html
(note: normally I dont blog spam, but figured you might be interested.)
I also agree with you thats its a pretty weak software right now, especially coming from the biggest software company in the world.