My "Big" Backyard

Taken while lying on my roof - McNulty style.

This morning I spent a while researching options for geotagging photos taken with my Olympus E-410 DSLR.  It doesn't have any built-in GPS capabilities, so the best solution I could find was to install a GPS logging application on my Blackberry (which does have GPS), make sure the time on the phone and the camera were synced up, then use another application to interpolate the timestamp from the photos with the location from the GPS log.

I put GPSLogger on my Blackberry and walked around the block, taking some photos along the way.  The GPSLogger app allows you to e-mail yourself the exported data in CSV, GPX, and KML (GoogleEarth) formats.  I looked over this post on Geocoding Photos with Open Source Tools, but didn't feel like taking the time to setup Perl and the other necessary dependencies (yet).  I downloaded this great Trailrunner application on Becca's Macbook (sorry, Becca, I realize this was an unapproved installation - but you can use it for tracking jogging!), which allowed me to drag-and-drop the GPX output exported from GPSLogger and displayed my route on a Google Maps interface, along with my speed, elevation, and exact coordinates.  Pretty cool, but not really what I was originally looking for.  I'm not sure if GPSLogger logs the current time of day, or just the time in relation to when you started logging (which is all I've seen so far).  If I start logging at 11:00AM, then take a photo at 11:15AM, it doesn't really help me to know my location at 15 minutes - I need the exact time of day (11:15AM) so I can cross-reference that with the timestamp on the photos.

So, that mission hasn't been entirely accomplished, but at least I got some fresh air and took some photos.  When I got back from my walk, I headed up to the roof and did some recon on our future backyard (pictured in the bottom right quadrant of the photo here).  It's looking a little rough right now, but it's definitely got potential.  With some clippers, mulch, and TLC we'll be in our Zen garden in no time.  The garden apartment will be ready in  two weeks, according to Romero - half of the two-man renovation team.