Even if you've never used such a program before, and you have no idea what a GPS is, you can still use this application to its full potential, without even needing to read the manual.Įasy to use and very visually appealing, it makes adding GPS information to your photos a pleasant task, regardless of how you do it.
All the additional windows needed flow out of the main one and there is no clutter whatsoever. The toolbar at the top of the window is groped into three stages, for each step of the process and the icons are representative. From the easy to use and intuitive workflow to the well designed interface, everything is a pleasure. You can tell from a glance that HoudahGeo is a program made from Macs. This can be either used to make serious presentations like showing houses available for sale in an area and the distances from them to major locations nearby, or for having a vivid visual representation of a trip taken with the family. Using Google Earth, you can create a very nice presentation with the images, as well as show the path traveled while taking them. Once all the information for the images is in place, you can finish up by exporting the information back to the EXIF tags of the photos or by exporting it to a Google Earth file. The same interface can be used to check the GPS information gathered from a device or file as well as fine tune it. Despite only being a link to the Google service, HoudahGeo is just as fast and a bit easier to use than the direct service. The program will present you with a Google Maps interface that lets you navigate to the location where the image was taken. In case you are manually editing the GPS info, things are quite different. Fortunately, HoudahGeo gives you the option to resolve any issues when you get started by letting you specify any time differences between the two clocks and set the appropriate time zones that may have come into play. If there are any differences between the two clocks, the information will be inaccurate, and if the clocks are not consistent throughout the entire project, things will become really garbled, so care must be taken. For the first two options, the accuracy of the information depends a lot on the clocks of both the device used to gather the GPS information and the camera's clock that lets the program know when they were taken. Whether you have the data from a device or a file, this step is very straightforward and intuitive. Once you have the images ready, it's time to add the GPS information. Unfortunately, these issues are within iPhoto and Aperture so there is nothing that HoudahGeo can do. While importing from the aforementioned programs seems the most logical step for those who use them, there are issues however with the way the images and the EXIF metadata is handled that make it better to use HoudahGeo before the images are imported into any other application. In fact, you cannot even bother with such projects if you don't wish to, but there are certain advantages to doing so.Īdding photos into a project can be done either by importing them from other photo management applications such as iPhoto or Aperture, or by importing the files themselves from the Finder. How exactly you structure them is irrelevant and can be done either in sessions, or by theme or other events. HoudahGeo works with projects, which are groups of photos. The information can come either from GPS devices or it can even be introduced by hand, but this programs makes both tasks easy and fast. HoudahGeo is a program that helps you get GPS information into the EXIF metadata found in digital photos. Unfortunately, if the GPS information isn't handled by the camera, you have to find some way to get the information there, but luckily, there are programs such as HoudahGeo which make the task quite easy.
Fortunately, while GPS positioning is still uncommon in cameras, this information can be attached to the photos in a number of different ways. EXIF metadata is standard, and it can be used for all kinds of purposes, one of which is keeping track of when and where the photo was taken.
Digital photos have come to all but replace traditional ones, and with the benefit of the computer, these photos can contain a lot more than just the image.