TagME

Well it took me a little longer than I originally planed but here is the first version of my new software project, TagME.

TagME is designed to solve all the geotagging problems I was having with the software that came with the GPS recorder I blogged about last month.

The main issue with the software that came with the GPS recorder was that when geotagging photos the output only worked in Google Earth and not with Google Maps. This first version of TagME fixes that problem by exporting to a KMZ file which can be displayed in either Google Earth or Maps (the ME in TagME stands for Maps and Earth -- clever don't you think!). I've also added support for setting the timezone (the GPS times are always in UTC, which is the same as GMT) which while possible in the bundled software was not very straightforward.

I will, however, be the first to admit that TagME is far from perfect. To start with there is as yet very little error checking going on so I expect you could quite easily crash the programme -- this will be my first priority for the next version. The main glaring omission is that there is no visualisation or ability to edit the GPS track data. Currently you can click a button to show the data in Google Earth (if you have it installed and are running Windows) but this takes a while and isn't ideal. Some form of track editor is definitely high on the list of features that need implementing as well as the ability to customize the photo bubbles as the current formatting is very boring.

I still think it is easier to use and produces better results than the bundled software so altogether not too bad for a fortnights work. Given the shocking state of the code at the moment I'm just making the executable version available which you should be able to run simply by clicking the shiny orange launch button.
You can also download a sample GPS track file and some photos to play with (note that I reckon the time offset for the photos should be -2 minutes).