In the Tail

Exploring the niche consumer

RoboGeo

March 25th, 2007

After I wrote the article about the Sony GPS-CS1KA GPS, I did a little more research and I’m not convinced that is the best way to go. The main intent of Geocoding your photographs, is to insert the GPS info into the EXIF headers. There are several programs that allow you to do this, from just plain editing the latitude and longitude into each picture, to pulling the GPS data from the time stamps of a back track log.

One of the main problems with the Sony unit is that it does not seem to be sensitive enough in urban areas. I would look at this review from digitalurban before making a decision.

Robogeo seems to be one of the more popular ones and it seems very full featured. It can directly access a Garmin GPS unit and can used GPX files generated by other GPS’s.

Another option if you are a little more technical and don't want to spend the money on Robogeo, is to use gpicsync. It's written in Python and will run on Windows and Linux. You still have to produce a GPX file so it's not as tightly integrated as Robogeo is.

You will still need a receiver capable of recording GPX files. I'm leaning towards the Garmin GPSMap 60CSx it uses the SiRF GPS chipset which is very accurate from everything I've read. It is quite a bit more than the Sony, but it's a full featured GPS. I do have an older Magellan Meridian Gold GPS unit, but when I downloaded back track information I did not see any time and dates associated with it.

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