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).
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.
. I haven't read the book, but inspiring none the less.
