Eye-Fi produces a card, Eye-Film, that is an SD card that can geolocate photos taken on it. This is an incredibly smart and easy way to add location to photos and still use any camera you choose. It does this by measuring the Wifi signals in the area and talking to Loki (no, not that one)

Unfortunately, it’s not available until Fall 2006.

Awhile ago I created a GoogleMaps template for posting location stories on BlogSpot, such is GreenerEarth.

I recently put together another project, the Forest Images Registry Project (or F.I.R.), for GreenerMagazine in conjunction with Dirty Greek and SustainaBlog. This project is a response to the recent US Government decision to approve the sale of US National Forest lands to raise money for rural buildings. See the recent Environmental News Network press release.

The FIR is to gather photographs and stories of visitors to these wonderful forests before they’re gone and to hopefully raise public awareness of the situation and contact their government representative with the citizen’s viewpoints.
If you would like to contribute images, check out the Forest Images Blog and join the Flickr! Group and triple-tag your images.

fir:forest=nameofforest
and/or
geo:lat=latitude
geo:lon=longitude
and/or
fir:state=statename

As a colophon, the Forest Images Registry Project site is written in Ruby on Rails (edge) and uses the Cartographer and rflickr plugins. The site is undergoing very active development, so stay tuned for some upcoming features.

I’m making the transition to a much more stable, usable, and tool-rich photo management tool, iView Media Pro 3. I got tired of dealing with the incredibly slow interface to iPhoto thanks to Apple’s incapable handling & testing of EXIF metadata in storing to their library.

But I digress.

Behold, there was scripting

… and it was good.

I had written an Applescript to set the latitude & longitude (and other location info) to selected photos in iPhoto. iPhoto was often beligerent and required a restart of the iPhoto (and possible database recreation) to read the location information (which was viewable in the “info” panel).

iView puts the location info as a user-editable set of fields in the EXIF data fields. Users can set city, region, country, etc. But for whatever reason, they are unable to change the latitude & longitude.

I paired down my iPhoto script to just handle latitude & longitude and handle getting the file name from iView. The tough part was how to get from the iView example selected_images to a useful POSIX path to feed to exiftool. This code does the trick.

set selectedID to selected_images(1)
if selectedID = {} then
	display dialog "No photos selected"
	return
end if

repeat with this_photo in selectedID
	set photo_path to path of this_photo
	set the image_file to the POSIX path of photo_path

Installing & Using the script

Download the script here and expand it in your ~/Library/Application Support/iView/Plug-ins/Scripts folder and then reload iView. You will also need exiftool, as it is the real magic behind the smoke & mirrors.

To use the script, select whatever photos you want to apply the same location information to. Then go to the “Scripts” icon in the menu bar, and choose the “Set Lat/Lon” script. Enter the latitude, longitude, and altitude in decimal format, pressing “OK” after each field. Wait a little while, and then a dialog will tell you how many photos were processed.

Back in iView, you should see the latitude & longitude information in the right side-bar. You can also turn on lat/lon view in the thumbnail view by pressing Command-J and selecting “Latitude” “Longitude” “Altitude”. You may need to press Command-B to rebuild the thumbnail to have the info show up the first time (or on updates).

When exporting images (say to flickr!), your geo-annotated data will stay intact and can then be mapped (or mapped).

Here is some quick Applescript that uses ExifTool to write Copyright, Title, Comments, and Keyword exif data to selected photos in iPhoto:

This script is released under the Creative Commons.

-- This applescript will set the exif keywords, name,
--  and comments of all selected iPhoto images using
--  the information current in iPhoto.
--
-- Author: Andrew Turner (http://highearthorbit.com)
--
property copyright : ¬
		"Copyright Andrew Turner, 2005. All Rights Reserved."
property URL : "http://highearthorbit.com"
property exifToolOriginal : "_original"

-- True retains copyright, False means Public Domain
property Copyrighted : "True"

tell application "iPhoto"
	activate
	try
		copy (my selected_images()) to these_images
		if these_images is false or (the count of these_images) ¬
			is 0 then ¬
			error "Please select a single image."

		repeat with i from 1 to the count of these_images
			set the keywordslist to ""
			set this_photo to item i of these_images
			tell this_photo
				set the image_file to the image path
				set the image_title to the title
				set the image_filename to the image filename
				set the image_comment to the comment
				set the assigned_keywords to the name of keywords
			end tell
			repeat with j from 1 to the count of assigned_keywords
				set the keywordslist to keywordslist & " -keywords+=" ¬
					& item j of assigned_keywords
			end repeat
			set output to do shell script ¬
				"exiftool -title='" & image_title & ¬
				"' " & keywordslist & ¬
				" " & " -comment='" & image_comment & ¬
				"' " & " -Copyright='" & copyright & ¬
				"' " & " -CopyrightNotice='" & copyright & ¬
				"' " & " -Rights='" & copyright & ¬
				"' " & " -Marked='" & Copyrighted & ¬
				"' " & "'" & image_file & "'"
			do shell script "rm '" & image_file & "'" ¬
				& exifToolOriginal
		end repeat

		display dialog "Exif writing complete."
	on error error_message number error_number
		if the error_number is not -128 then
			display dialog error_message buttons {"Cancel"} ¬
				default button 1
		end if
	end try
end tell

on selected_images()
	tell application "iPhoto"
		try
			-- get selection
			set these_items to the selection
			-- check for single album selected
			if the class of item 1 of these_items is album then error
			-- return the list of selected photos
			return these_items
		on error
			return false
		end try
	end tell
end selected_images

You can grab this script and a simpler Copyright only, as well as a Location (latitude/longitude/city,region,country) script here.

I’ve never heard of smugMug before, or if I have it was in a caffeine-induced frenzy of web-browsing. I probably said, “Oh, neat, another photo-sharing site” and moved on. However, based on the recent fracas regarding Flickr requiring Yahoo! accounts and the possible integration of Yahoo-nes to the otherwise clean & functional flickr interface, smugMug looks like a nice option.

However, I recently came across their GoogleMaps integration, smugMaps. It’s very much like geobloggers, except geobloggers seems to have gone off the deep-end on functionality, widgets, and whatnot. They even describe (though with much detail left out), how to mix-up your own geo-tagged smugMug images.

Reading the “about us” page on smugMug makes me think the site should be called “smugInternetBarons”, but I digress. Their self-touted wealth may prevent them from ‘cashing in’ later to some company like Yahoo! (or MSN) and instead just continue as an independent, fun photo-sharing service.