Camera with GPS

[codfish2]

I'm looking to buy a new camera and would like to get GPS positions embedded into the photos. Can anyone recommend a good and reliable camera?

[Doug Pardee]

Good luck.

To my knowledge there are currently only three digicams with built-in GPS: the Nikon P6000, the Samsung CL65, and the Ricoh 500SE. According to most reviews, the GPS in the Nikon is almost unusable, requiring a long time (some report as long as 15 minutes) to acquire a GPS lock. The Ricoh is a specialty tool for commercial use—surveying, etc.—and has a price that will take your breath away, if you can even find a dealer. The Samsung is fairly new and I haven't found any reviews on it, but the folded-optics lens and tiny 1/2.3 sensor don't give me much confidence in the quality of the photos.

Some cell phones will take geo-tagged pictures. The iPhone is the most well-known of those.

[dakwegmo]

Nikon's pro bodies (D3/x/s, D700, D300/s) can all geotag photos, but they require an adapter to recieve the GPS information. The cable I just bought will let me sync my handheld GPS reciever with my camera when I'm in the field.

[sybren]

You don't even need a GPS-enabled camera to do geotagging. All you need is a GPS unit that can log to some storage (usually an internal memory card). When you're back home you can compare the timestamps of your photos against your GPS log to know where they were taken. With a little programming skill you can automate the whole process!

[OsmosisStudios]

Originally Posted by dakwegmo

Nikon's pro bodies (D3/x/s, D700, D300/s) can all geotag photos, but they require an adapter to recieve the GPS information. The cable I just bought will let me sync my handheld GPS reciever with my camera when I'm in the field.

This is a function of the GP-1 unit, not the body.

[dakwegmo]

Originally Posted by OsmosisStudios

This is a function of the GP-1 unit, not the body.

Or an MC-35 with a compatible GPS receiver, hence the part about requiring an adapter.

[codfish2]

Thank you all for your advice. I think I'll go with sybrens advice and buy an external GPS unit and retrofit the pictures with the GPS information. That way I'll hopefully get the best of both worlds.

I tried to have a closer look at some pictures taken with an iPhone, and the GPS coordinates are nicely embedded into the EXIF-information of the pictures. I used this simple tool to read the EXIF information of the pictures:
The world is a strange place - Exif Toolbox

Thank you for your advices.

[inkista]

There are several GUI applications out there that can do the syncing for you, provided you can get the track file off the GPS device, and in a useable format. GPS tracking data can sometimes be worse than RAW file formats in terms of incompatibility. Typically, you're looking for a device that can do NMEA track files, and/or converting your GPS file format to GPX (an XML GPS open standard) with some GPSBabel front end (I like HoudaGPS, but I'm on a Mac).

Geotagging packages will do the synching of the timestamps in the GPS track and the photos and write the GPS information into the EXIF. Just be sure that you synch your camera's clock with the GPS clock before you start shooting, or that the app you're looking for has the ability to "slide" the time codes of either the track or the photos around. I like GPSPhotoLinker.

The biggest frustration you may run into is not the computer processing side of the task, but that the GPS track may not actually have the data you want, if you get a receiver that doesn't do well under tree cover or in urban canyons.

[sybren]

The biggest snag that I hit with many available tools is that they want to tag JPEG files, whereas I only shoot in RAW. I solved this by writing a utility that can geotag an entire set on Flickr, using the Python FlickrAPI kit.