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.

Alamy Upsize Tool

I’ve recently started using Alamy for an avenue of image sales. One of their requirements is that the image must be over 48Mb uncompressed. At first I was a little confused as to what that means for the actual image size and the resulting dimensions that are required. After finding some info on the web with formulas, etc. I came up with this spreadsheet that allows you to easily figure out how big your new files has be to get the right size file. Simply enter in your original image dimensions, desired final uncompressed file size, and the resulting new image dimensions appear in the cells below. Try it out below.



This information is all I need to enter into many resizing software programs in order the get the right file size every time.

My Geotagging Workflow

Google Earth Screenshot - Iguazu Falls (Argentina/Brazil) with images and Data Logger Track

1.) Sync Camera time with Local Time

2.) Take photos while logging your location continuously with a Data Logger

3.) Import JPEG photos and Data Logger log (.nmea format) onto computer

4.) Use software locr to combine JPEGs and location log, embed into file. This program can also export your geolog file and photos into Google Earth. And if you happen to forget to sync your camera time to your local time, you can shift this time by minute/second/hours to match your geolog (which will be on UTC time)

5.) If using Picasa, the newly geotagged photos won’t be recognized by this program (something to do with the format of the GPS data). I got around this by using this GUI to change the format of the GPS EXIF data to something Picasa could read. If you don’t use Picasa then you shouldn’t need this second step.

6.) More on Geotagging RAW images in later posts.

Now as GPS becomes more integrated into cameras, then there will be less need to have separate devices logging your location as you take photos. I haven’t tried any cameras with this integrated technology yet, but I think it’ll become a feature seen in many more models to come.