One of the big new features of iPhoto announced in iLife 09 is support for geotagging. During the keynote and in the demonstration video posted on the website, Apple use a Nikon P6000 which rather handily has a GPS built in. But what about the rest of us users who have cameras without GPS or those that would like to geotag their photos but don't want to use iPhoto?

Well we have a couple of options. First (and easiest) is to manually enter the location. Nice and simple. However, I'm not a fan of this method. First, of all it only works well if you have a reasonable idea of your location. Secondly, if you take half as many shots as I do on holiday, then the prospect of spending a few hours tagging each image doesn't really appeal.

The second option is to use a GPS device and then sync the records it produces with your photos. The theory is simple when activated, the logger will make a record of my GPS co-ordinates every few seconds. This then builds up into a very accurate trail of your movements. The simplest analogy would be the breadcrumbs from Hansel and Gretel.

I personally use a GPS logger from Holux, snappily titled the M-241. It's a small film canister sized unit and is very simple to use. When switched on, it will automatically begin logging until you instruct it to stop. No fussy set-up, no sorting files - turn it on and it is ready to go. When ready, simply upload the track using Bluetooth. Unfortunately, this model is not officially supported on the Mac. This tends to be the case with 99% of the GPS loggers that I looked at. Luckily some enterprising people wrote a piece of software called BT747 which allows the unit to be used with the Mac. It's not the best looking bit of software, but it is functional.

Once we have our tracks uploaded to the computer, the next step is to get the co-ordiates into your photos. Thankfully the situation here is rather healthier as there are some very good pieces of software for the Mac to perform this exact task. The way it works is that the software looks at the timestamp on the GPS co-ordinate, and the timestamp of the photo you have taken. When it finds a match, it writes the co-ordinate into the photos metadata and voila one geotagged photo.

But enough about the theory, lets see how it works in practice.

The first and most important step is to ensure that the internal clock on your camera is in sync with the clock on your GPS unit.

If these times differ, then your photos are going to be tagged with incorrect location data.

Once your logger has a fix on the satellites and is starting to record its log, then you're good to go!

The next stage is the fun part - go out and take your photos.

Once back at your computer, launch BT747 and click 'Get Log' to download the track you have have just made to your computer. When downloaded, you can export this into other formats such as a KML to view the trail in Google Earth. For this example we will convert our file to GPX.

At this stage I would recommend copying your images off of your memory card and into a directory on your computer. Although this next stage can be done directly on the memory card, its better to be safe and not modify your original files.

The program that I recommend to sync your GPX file with your photos is name HoudahGeo - we'll launch this now.

HoudaGeo requests its data in stages. First we'll add our image files.

As we can see, there is no positioning information at this time. Now we open the GPX file we created with BT747.

Immediately, HoudaGeo has compared the timestamps and matched the co-oridinates to the photos. We can now save the information, and the files are available to use.

Now what?

So now we have our geotagged images, what can we do with them? Well in iPhoto, they have a new feature called 'Places'. It's something that I'm looking forward to playing with, but what can we do without iPhoto?

I store all my images in Lightroom - Adobes excellent organisation and cataloging program. If we take a look at the metadata in Lightroom, we can now see the GPS co-ordinates, and by clicking on the arrow next to it, we can see where the photo was taken using Google Maps.

As you may know, I put a few of my photos on Flickr. Flickr has had support for geotagging for quite some time. When a geotagged image is uploaded, Flickr identifies this and automatically places it on a pop up map linked from the photos page.

Flickr also has maps in which shows all your geotagged images on a much larger map. You can also perform image searches from this map and see other users geotagged images.

Here we can see I've geotagged images in England, Scotlad, Turkey and of course Guernsey.

Another Mac application is Ovolab Geophoto. This places your images on a Google Earth style globe. You can zoom in for more detail, and it will also show a marker in Google Earth. In the example below, you can see the photos taken around Holloyrood Park when for Steve and Gina's wedding. Thats one of the nice things about geotagging, you can see exactly where you were at the time of the photo.

One other thing that I like to do with the GPX file is to import it into a program called RubiTrack. It actually has nothing to do with photography, and is designed as a fitness monitor. I use it as a catalogue for my trails. It has a nice mapping feature, and records such details as the weather conditions when then trail was made. it can also read some of the more advanced data such as speed and altitude.

It makes for a nice reminder of the places you've been - for example this trail of a boat trip I took in Turkey last year.

If you have any suggestions for Mac GPS applications, I'd love to hear about them.

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I have a not-so-secret double life.

By day, I'm a mild manned wage slave; but some nights I like to dress up in my robe and wizards hat and join a few million other players in Azeroth.

Yes ladies and gentlemen, I play World of Warcraft.

But Neil, I hear you cry, 'what could someone like you possibly enjoy about such a geeky game?' Well apart from the obvious, I actually enjoy playing it. I get bored with the grinding, same as everyone else, but otherwise I really like the majority of the quest. The game displays a healthy sense of humor, doesn't take itself too seriously (unlike some MMO's I could mention) and best of all - theres a Mac native client so I don't need a Windows box to play. I'm also lucky in that a number of my 'real life' friends play as well, and between us we've got a pretty well balanced party.

Jeff is a Mage, Ed is a Warlock. Jim is a Rouge (what a shocker), and Glenn is a Warrior - our tank.

This is me, Altamiranna.

I play a Blood-Elf Priest, and its pretty much my job to keep the other guys alive. Well when I'm not out of mana that is! Of course, I can always do a bit of soloing as well.

So, I've been happly playing on and off for a few years now. Until tonight that is.

Oh bugger!

Double bugger!

It would appear that my account has been hijacked. I'm guessing that it happened this afternoon, as Jeff told me that he'd seen my online but not responding to any messages. Hmm, I wonder why that was.
Unfortunately, Blizzards customer support line only seems to operate between 08:00-17:00 - Monday to Friday ie, when everyone is work and not able to get to their gaming machines. I've had to report the problem via their web-form, which rather ominously states that it may take some time to resolve the issue.

Since I'm unable to even access my account management, I'm rather concerned that the little runt that has changed both my password and my e-mail address (so that I cannot re-set the password) now has access to my payment options and may be able to get my bank details. Whilst I'm not going to give Blizzard too much stick for only manning the phones during office hours. I do think the lack of weekend coverage when peoples bank details are exposed is an unacceptable risk.

So for the next few days, I'm going to blog the responses from Blizzard and document the damage that has been wrought on my account. I fully expect to log back in to find a naked blood-elf, penniless, weaponless and mountless.

If I'm lucky, Blizzard may be able to restore poor Altamiranna to her former glory.

Stay tuned for the next installment of 'looks like I've been hacked'.

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Now I've got he 3G modem, I've finally been able to test out screen sharing on my Mac's. In fact this entry is actually being written on my imac, from my MBA whilst I'm at work. Pretty cool, and could turn out to be pretty useful.

I notice that I've been getting a few hits regarding the Oregon Scientific helmet cam.

The search queries tend to be regarding its compatibility with Mac's.

The short answer is that yes. These are compatible with Mac's. If you hook it up to your mac using the supplied USB cable, the camera will mount as an external drive and you can just import videos as normal.

The problem is that you can't do much with the videos, and so I'm just going to give you a little step-by-step guide to how I process the files.

Getting the files

First up, do yourself a huge favour and pick up an SD-Card reader. This is far quicker then transferring using the camera directly, and has a 2nd advantage of not draining the cameras batteries.

Imply drag and drop into your desired folder.

Viewing / Editing Files

I can't be 100% certain of this as things my have changed with newer releases. However, when I first got my camera Quicktime would not recognise the .avi file at all. It wasn't until i'd installed the VLC player that it would play the files. I guess that VLC must install a couple of its own codecs.

However, lets take a look at that file size - 370.9MB is a tad on the large side. I tend to recompress my files using VisualHub - one of the best pieces of software available on the Mac today in my opinion. The makers of VisualHub also make iSquint, which is VH's baby brother but had the advantage of being freeware.

I convert to H.264 as I know that iMovie can handle this nicely. It will also look noticeably better if you upload to youtube then the original file.

As you can see, this now comes down to a much more manageable 126.2MB and since its in H.264, you know its going to work with whatever video editor you choose.

And heres the finished example on Youtube.

Conclusions

Its a little hard to be totally enthusiastic about this camera. Its fun, but the lack of Mac support makes it less convenient then it should be to get the files into your media editor.

Picture quality is on a par with the kind of clips your digital camera produces, and can struggle with darkness and high contrast. See the sky being whited out as I go down the hill in the video. Occasionally vibrations can cause this strange 'waving' effect. Kind of like a flag in the wind. Its also worth remembering that there is no image stablisation on the camera. With a helmet camera your likely to be filming some quite active scenes. The body will absorb some movement, but if you are attaching it to something solid like handlebars or forks, then I'd recommend placing some foam or rubber underneath the mount. Sound quality is pretty awful as you can tell on the video. The range of the mic is only a couple of feet, and the gain is low - hence the tearing noises on the video. I originally put this down to the exhaust being too loud on the bike. But I've had the same problem with the camera attached to my Electric powered RC car.

So far I've sounded pretty negative about the camera, but it does have its good points. First off, it is a rugged unit. It been attached to my RC car, and survived crashes unscathed. Its also waterproof, so no worries about rain and mud. Also as its a self contained unit, there are no wires to worry about, just stick on whatever you want to film and off you go. The price is a little steep (especially in the UK) and the video is a little disappointing. However, the ability to film situations you'd never take your expensive DV camera into more then makes up for it.

To be honest, I keep trying to think of things I can use the camera for so I can get more cool footage.

If you can live with the quirks, and image quality is not massively important then this is a cool little camera.

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http://www.macworld.com/news/2007/07/16/gearsofwar/index.php

So apparently Gears of War and Unreal Tournament 3 have been confirmed for the Mac. Looks like they weren't joking about getting games onto the system at WWDC.

Reasons for me to get a copy of Parallels and XP are looking even more remote.