OpenStreetMap
My dear wife is on a business trip, so I decided this weekend was OSM weekend. I'm still very much in the realm of testing systems, but I've made some useful contributions along the way.
My setup today:
* Nokia 6600 slide (work phone) + Nokia LD-4W (bluetooth GPS bought from Amazon) = GPS + music!
* Nokia 3110c (private phone) = camera
* Mountain Bike = transport + exercise (I commute to work on rollerblades, but I like my bike for mapmaking)
* TrekBuddy
My discoveries:
* Taking photos for street names is all very well, but if you don't make waypoints, it's near impossible to line up the photos with the track.
* The Nokia 3110C doesn't put timestamps on its photos, making it even harder to correlate photos with places.
* TrekBuddy can make my work phone take photos and associate them with waypoints. Duh. If I'd done that, I'd have had usable photographic evidence of where what street was.
* If you wear a cycle helmet and pretend you belong, security guards at business parks and gated settlements usually let you slip past boom gates without protest.
* Security guards get quite nervous of people taking photos, though.
Discussion
Comment from Snusmumriken on 31 October 2009 at 19:27
Doesn't 6600 have a camera and can't you run Location Tagger on it so that the photos get the gps coordinates?
Comment from slashme on 1 November 2009 at 05:08
Nokia decided to re-use numbers: the 6600 is a Symbian phone, so I guess Location tagger is now integrated into it. The "6600 slide" is not a Symbian phone, so it can't run Location Tagger. I dislike using its camera, because (even though it's not required in South Africa) the shutter sound is locked on in the one I have. But still, now that I've figured out how to link the photos to waypoints from TrekBuddy, it's probably my best option.
Comment from kaihs on 1 November 2009 at 14:29
My phone is also too dump store a timestamp into an EXIF header, it doesn't even create an EXIF header.
But I've found a way around this, if you are using Linux (or some other flavour of *nix):
use
cp --preserve=timestamp
to copy the pictures from the phone to another directory
Then use
jhead -mkexif -dsft
to create an EXIF header with a timestamp based on the file creation date.
After that you can use the tool of your choice (I use gpsPhoto) to geotag the pictures.
Comment from slashme on 1 November 2009 at 14:45
That's actually quite a neat solution. I did in fact copy my pictures off the phone onto my linux box, and it did preserve the timestamps, but they weren't well enough synchronized with the GPS trace that I could clearly identify where they belonged. I've just done two small mapping runs where I'm using TrekBuddy to take photos and associate them with waypoints, and JOSM works beautifully with them. I just move the gps track directory and the waypoints directory off the phone onto the PC, load the data into JOSM, and clickable icons of all the pictures are neatly arranged where I took them. It really works well.
Comment from slashme on 1 November 2009 at 14:48
Wow, I've just checked out gps2photo, and it looks brilliant! If I keep a tracklog with my gps device and take photos with my normal camera, I'll be able to geotag them. Thanks for the tip!
Comment from slashme on 1 November 2009 at 14:55
And even better, I see I can get both jhead and gpscorrelate straight off the Debian repository. Nice!