How to obtain GPS coordinates for photos without much hassle.

As is the case with traditional herbarium specimens, the value of a photo of a plant depends also on the knowledge of exactly where the photo was taken. The obvious solution for that is to use GPS, but it has one drawback: it is very cumbersome to make a concordance between the event (photo take) and the location. Generally it is done by writing down for each GPS location the photo number or vice versa, and this is prone to errors, is time consuming, and requires paper and pencil, things that get lost very easily in field. There is some high-end equipment on the market which allows to trigger recording of the GPS location for each take, but it is quite expensive and requires a physical connection between the camera and the GPS.

There is an extremely simple way to solve the problem with any GPS equipment, provided that you can download the data from it (today virtually all of the GPS units have this option): If you have an older GPS unit which allows only manual recording of the waypoints, when you arrive on each new location, you have just to record the location as a new waypoint (without worrying about the number/name/etc. of this waypoint). Every time you move sufficiently to justify it as a new location, you simply press the store waypoint button. On more modern units you can program them to take automatically waypoints every certain time. In that case you just have to let the GPS unit run and record every 2 minutes or so the waypoints automatically.

After you get home, the only thing you have to do is to download the data of the waypoints, and then use a simple program which we developed (about 50 lines) which compares the time of each waypoint record with the time of each photo take and then assigns the GPS data to that photo or group of photos: all the photos whose timeframe  falls between the first waypoint and the next waypoint get assigned the GPS data of that first waypoint. It is as simple as that.

Home  |  About us  |  Chilean Flora  |  Habitats  |  Plant Database  |  Tours  |  Seeds  |  Seedlings  |  Links  |  Contact

Copyright notice and terms of use