Summer is here. Summer holidays are just around the corner. This is the time of year when many of us usually plan to travel and explore the world. Not so this year.
Explore. Reminisce. Show
This year we can reminisce about past travels and adventures. This summer we can dig into our well-organized photo collections. Photos organized by location now allow us to virtually jump around the globe and through time. We can explore photos in Google Earth to feel teleported to places we had the luck to visit. With photos pinned to precise map locations, we can retrace our steps in Google Maps. Nothing refreshes the memory like photos combined with the aerial views that reveal how the individual pictures connect.
Now may be a good time to dig up one of those cookbooks bought on the road. Cook a local dish to revive your memories.
Organize. Prepare
This summer also offers a good opportunity to work on those photos that are not quite as well-organized as we would like. Organize photos into albums, add titles and descriptions, tag faces, and assign locations. Adding locations to photos is obviously easiest when we can rely on a GPS recording of our movements. With a GPS recording, we not only get the exact locations of each photo, but we can also see the route taken between stops.
Still geotagging photos manually is quite easy and can actually be a fun and rewarding experience. The map in HoudahGeo makes it easy to assign locations to a sequence of photos. One only needs to move the map to reflect the distance traveled between two photos.
Each photo thus just needs but a nudge of the map and a click. The procedure quickly brings back memories of how one originally visited and discovered the locations. Maps and satellite views not only help to find the locations, but they also help remember and explain which part of a site came into sight first and how another marvel was hidden just around the corner.
Retracing steps and comparing photos with satellite views often allow finding photo spots with pinpoint accuracy.
HoudahGeo 6.0: Geotag Photos. Add Locations
Earlier this year HoudahGeo got a major upgrade. We hoped to use HoudahGeo 6.0 on trips this summer. That was not meant to be. Now it can help organize and visualize past photos.
HoudahGeo 6.0 added support for JPEG+RAW pairs. These are now treated as a single photo and are assigned the same GPS coordinates, title, description, keywords, etc.
In HoudahGeo, you can now select which time zone to use for writing photo times to EXIF/XMP metadata. Photo dates and times can now look “right”: match the local time at the location in the photo.
macOS 11 Big Sur is expected to be released this fall. Now is a good time to plan to migrate to away from Apple Aperture. HoudahGeo 6.0 can help by copying photo metadata to industry-standard EXIF/XMP tags. This ensures that this information will always stay with the photo files – through this and future migrations.