My Geotagging Workflow: RAW / DNG Files and Lightroom

Although I haven't tried any dedicated plug-ins in Lightroom for geotagging photos (one is available here), the workflow below is relatively straight forward and allows you to geotag photos manually or automatically with a GPS track file (NMEA, GPX). I've summarized a workflow for geotagging JPEG files using the program locr already, but in this post I'll concentrate on DNG files (and RAW files, assuming you'll be converting your RAW files to DNG format). Adobe has a pretty straight forward converter for this here.

1.) Find the files you want to geotag. If the files are currently in RAW format, I convert to DNG since storing metadata in RAW files can be problematic and/or keeping track of sidecar files can also be a chore.

2.) If you have imported your photos into Lightroom already, now is the time to save your metadata to the files - any changes, keywording, edits, etc. you've done to each file in Lightroom. This step is crucial, especially if you have done a lot of edits to your photos before geotagging - similar to my case as I continue to go back through my catalogue and update/improve a lot of the metadata. If you don't save any previous edits done in Lightroom, then when you import the updated information (GPS coordinates in this case) generated in GeoSetter, all other edits will be lost if you did any.

3.) With each DNG file you want to geotag, updated with the latest metadata from Lightroom, you can now work with these files in a separate Geotagging program (GeoSetter in this case, since locr doesn't support DNG or RAW file formats).

Screenshot from GeoSetter website.

4.) Tag your photos manually or automatically with GeoSetter, adding any additional metadata you want at that time. One interesting feature in this program is the ability to automatically populate the location fields in IPTC data (Country Code, country, province, city) once the image is geotagged. You can also do the same thing with altitude values.

5.) One you've tagged and saved the new data to your files in GeoSetter, you can then go back to Lightroom and "Read Metadata from files" to update the files in Lightroom with the GPS data (and any other location/elevation/metadata you've added).

6.) Repeat the process for any files you want to Geotag!

Overall I've found Geosetter to be more intuitive, user friendly and flexible than locr, so will probably use this program for all my geotagging needs.

Digital Asset Management (DAM)

I've recently started organizing my photo's more formally, on the one hand for my personal collection, on the other for professional aspirations. I have about 15,000 photos in my collection dating back to 2002 digitally, and digital scans of film. The mountain of information I had and have ahead of me can be quite intimidating, but I found a few great resources that's made my job easier, or at least helped break the monumental task into manageable steps. Adobe Lightroom - I originally had my files organized by Picasa, but with the limited transferability and flexibility of that program for rating (only one star), tagging, keywording, and entering other meta data I needed something more robust.

Books & Articles

The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers, by Peter Krogh, has been a great resource for me in organizing my photos and getting some ideas of where to start. Although written with Adobe Bridge and Photoshop in mind, many of the tips and concepts can be applied to any DAM system.

I also came across this article by Eric Scouten about organizing your lightroom catalogue that's worth read.

After implementing the "bucket" system recommended by Peter, I've found the easiest way to keep track of my progress is doing a screen print using a screen capture tool and recording on those sheets what I've done to each folder. For example, if I rate, keyword, and at location information to the IPTC tags of all the images in a certain folder, I'll note that as I go along.

It'll be a long road of organizing, rating, keywording, etc. to go, but when it's all done my catalogue will be better for it. What are your thoughts on Digital Asset Management and how do you keep your photos organized?

Getting Back to Morocco

I'm finally getting my files more organized and have migrated to Lightroom 2.0 for this process. This process has many many steps, especially when going back to files originally on film. I'll be creating more detailed posts on my digital asset management (DAM) process, but during one of these steps I went back to 2003 for a while, organizing my photos from Morocco. Below are a few favorites.