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Fill Geotagging Gaps Left by Slow-to-Start GPS Camera

In order to save battery, many GPS-enabled cameras power their GPS receiver only once you turn on the camera. It then takes anyhwere from a couple of seconds to several minutes for the GPS to know where you currently are.

If you take a photo during this power-up phase, the camera is left with the option to use a previously recorded GPS location or forgo geotagging the photos.

At the end of the day, you will have a set of photos where some images lack geotags. This can easily be fixed with HoudahGeo.Geocoding gap left by GPS camera

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Save HoudahSpot Searches as Finder Smart Folders

In Mac OS X’s Finder, you can save searches as “Smart Folders”. These give you quick access to all your files that meet certain criteria. For example, all Microsoft Word files modified this month. All JPG photos taken with a specific camera. Or all e-mails you’ve received from certain senders within the last seven days.

Because Mac OS X Smart Folders are actually saved searches, they differ from regular folders: they don’t actually hold anything – they only list files stored elsewhere. The content of Smart Folder is not static but dynamic. It is updated continuously as new files come to meet the smart folder’s search criteria. This means that its content changes every time files on your Mac are added, changed, or removed.

With HoudahSpot (4.1 or later), you can easily set up a search and export it as a Finder Smart Folder.

Continue reading Save HoudahSpot Searches as Finder Smart Folders

Incremental Photo Geocoding Using Maps

Manually geocoding a long list of photos can be daunting. With HoudahGeo it’s a snap. Follow the workflow outlined below and you’ll be done in no time.

The workflow takes advantage of the fact that the distance travelled between two photos is often rather short and easy to retrace. Once you have determined the location of the first photo, you just need to make incremental adjustments to geocode subsequent photos. It takes but a nudge to the map and a click for each photo.

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Creating Snippets in HoudahSpot

In HoudahSpot, snippets let you to set aside frequently used combinations of search criteria. HoudahSpot comes with a few pre-installed snippets, but you can also define your own.

Snippets can hold a single search criterion or a group of criteria that serve a certain purpose. The pre-installed snippet “Date Created range”, for example, holds two criteria in an “All of the following are true” group: “Content created before” and “Content created after”. Use this snippet whenever you want to find files created in a range of dates.

HoudahSpot's Sidebar & Refine Pane
Drag the snippet from the sidebar to refine pane (example: Date range snippet)

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Efficient Geotagging: HoudahGeo’s Places Feature

The Places feature introduced in HoudahGeo 5 allows you to save frequently used locations as favorites. This makes manual geotagging – picking locations from a map – way more efficient.

Places can be used in two different ways: as presets for location coordinates and names or as map bookmarks. Continue reading Efficient Geotagging: HoudahGeo’s Places Feature

Stash Extra Criteria in Search Templates

In HoudahSpot, you can temporarily disable individual search criteria. This is particularly useful in combination with templates: have different criteria preconfigured, enable them as needed. Continue reading Stash Extra Criteria in Search Templates

Find Files from a List of Names

Sometimes, you get a list of file names and need to find the actual files. You may be a photographer who sent out a contact sheet for photo proofing and got back an email listing the images to be printed. Or you may have sent friends messages with tiny photos and got a reply asking for larger copies of images 7359, 7365 and 7366.

HoudahSpot can help you work through such notes and collect the requested files. Continue reading Find Files from a List of Names

Publish Your Photos on a Map

With HoudahGeo 5, it’s now even easier to create and share a map with your photos. HoudahGeo publishes photos and track logs on Dropbox. You can then view these in Google My Maps.

This is what your results can look like:

Click on the thumbnail images in the map to see the photo and additonal information. The red line is the path we travelled – recorded on a GPS track logging device.

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HoudahSpot: 10 Years of Successful Searching on the Mac

10 years ago, we released the very first version of what came to be one of the most popular search tools on the Mac: HoudahSpot.
Continue reading HoudahSpot: 10 Years of Successful Searching on the Mac

Why Geotag Photos?

Geotags are metadata information added to a file, in our case an image file. They usually take the form of GPS coordinates. Additionally, location names like city, state and country can be written to metadata.

By adding geotags to your photos, you basically “pin” them to the places they were taken. There are good reasons to consider geotagging your photos: Continue reading Why Geotag Photos?