Geotagging Photos Using Adobe Lightroom

UPDATE: Sadly, it seems that Everytrail will soon be unsupported, so we will need to find another way to embed route maps with geotagged photos (thanks to Olivier for the heads up). I am currently exploring other options like WP GPX Maps and Geomashup. It’s also possible using these instructions on GPSVisualiser.com (from the creator of Everytrail.com), but it’s not nearly as straightforward. If anyone finds a better solution, please drop me a comment!

I’ve been using the Garmin Edge 800 for several years for GPS cycling navigation and GPX route tracking, but up until now I’d I’ve never used my GPX tracks for geotagging photos. Now that we have a new fancy pants camera, I thought it was time to test it out. Thanks to my brother Lucas for introducing me to Lightroom and thanks to John Nack for his video which explains very clearly how to geotag photos in Adobe Lightroom using a GPX file. I did this using a GPX file from my Edge 800, but it could be done just as easily with any device which can record GPX tracks (ie, basically any smartphone).

Using Adobe Lightroom to geotag photos from a GPX track file
Using Adobe Lightroom to geotag photos from a GPX track file

How to embed a map of geotagged photos

So what can you do with the photos once they are geotagged? Well, I decided to upload them to Picasa using the Picasa Web Upload plugin for Lightroom. I like this option because Picasa integrates well with Google Maps and Panoramio. I was able to upload all the photos from Lightroom to Picasa and then view a Google map of all the photos for a particular the Picasa album. Here’s an example of a Picasa geotagged photo map for Oaxaca, Mexico.

Still, this wasn’t exactly what I wanted, because I could not find a simple way of embedding this map in a WordPress blog post. I discovered the XML Google Maps WordPress plugin. This allows you to embed the Picasa photo map in a WordPress post simply by adding the Google Earth link to the page (as described here). See a screenshot of result below from the photos I uploaded.

Screenshot of XML Google Maps WordPress Plugin. I removed the actual plugin because we are using EveryTrail.com instead.
Screenshot of XML Google Maps WordPress Plugin. I removed the actual plugin because we are using EveryTrail.com instead.

Hmmm, this is still not quite what I wanted though. I want the photo thumbnails to appear superimposed on the GPX track from the cycle route on which the photos were taken. Then I discovered Everytrail.com. I uploaded the GPX track to my new Everytrail account and then linked this track to the Picasa album using Evertrail’s new Picasa integration. Here is the result below.

[wi_everytrail url=”2038034″ title=”View map on Everytrail.com”]

 

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