By Tim Grey
What does it mean to say, "Find your photos?" Traditionally that meant literally just finding where particular photos reside on your computer (or a physical location back when film was king). But with new tools and advanced technology, finding your photos can mean finding not just the photos themselves, but finding the exact location where you took a photo. This, in turn, will make it even easier to search for the photos themselves later. Microsoft Pro Photo Tools enables you to apply location information to your photos so you can always know exactly where they were captured.
This capability is generally referred to as "geotagging," and it opens up a whole new world of possibilities with your digital photos. As GPS devices have gotten smaller, better, and less expensive, geotagging has become increasingly popular. And while having a GPS receiver makes all of this much more powerful and automatic, you don't need any special tools (such as a GPS receiver, though that makes the process much more automatic) to apply location information to your photos, thanks to Microsoft Pro Photo Tools.
The power of metadata
Metadata is often referred to as "information about information," because it is literally just information about something else that itself contains data. In this case we're talking about digital photos, and metadata refers to the various information you can store along with your photos.
For example, when you capture a photo with a digital camera the various camera settings—such as shutter speed, aperture, lens focal length, and other details—are stored in metadata and included with the actual image file. Viewing this information can be informative, but adding new details to your photos provides an incredible amount of power and flexibility when it comes to organizing and locating photos later.
When you launch Microsoft Pro Photo Tools you can drag-and-drop images directly into the Thumbnails tab or select File > Open Images to get started. On the Tasks list at the left, you can select any of the options under Metadata to view the information contained within the selected photo, including capture location, and photographer information, among other details. In fact, you can even select multiple photos and update metadata values for all of them at once. When you're finished updating the various values for your photos, select File > Save All Images with New Data from the menu to permanently update the files with the data you've added or changed.
Going global
As you go through the various metadata fields for some of your photos in Pro Photo Tools, you might have noticed the Location section, which contains fields for location name information (Street Address, City, State, and Country) as well as GPS Data field (Latitude and Longitude). As you can probably imagine, having all of these details for every photo could be incredibly helpful later when you want to find a photo based on where you took it, or when you need to know exactly where a photo was taken.
Of course, you probably don't want to spend the day (or several days) after a big photo trip performing data entry for the location data for each photo. That's where the power of Pro Photo Tools really starts to shine.
If you have a GPS receiver, you may already have all you need to automatically tag your images with location information. In fact, with some digital cameras it is possible to have the data added to your images automatically at the time of capture. If not, you can use a GPS receiver you carry with you while taking pictures to record a track route that contains date, time, and GPS coordinates at set intervals.
To add GPS coordinate information to your photos:
- Open your photos in Pro Photo Tools.
- Go to the Location section under Tasks > Metadata > Image on the left panel.
- Select all images by pressing Ctrl+A, and then click the Load from File button under Track Route.
- Click the Place Images button under Track Route and the images will be placed on the map. You can fine-tune the position using the slider controls below the map.
- When the images are in the correct position along the track route, click Done, and the GPS coordinates will be added to your photos based on the time stamps in the track route file.
It gets even better though. Leveraging the power of Windows Live Local, Pro Photo Tools will then determine the location name information for the photos based on the GPS coordinates. This allows you to have more meaningful location information attached to your photos, which is especially helpful when you want to later search or images based on their specific location.
If your images already have GPS coordinate information but not location names, you can also update those details automatically by selecting the images in the Thumbnails tab and clicking the Get Location Text button in the Location section. Pro Photo Tools will then use the GPS coordinates in each photo to determine the location text names using Windows Live Local.
It doesn't take much time working with a GPS receiver to realize you can't rely on a good signal all the time. If you are indoors or otherwise don't have a clear view of an adequate portion of the sky (a GPS receiver must receive the signal from several satellites at a time in order to be able to determine your location), you won't be able to record your GPS coordinates. This can lead to a situation where there are gaps in your location information. Pro Photo Tools can estimate the location for those photos based on the location information in other photos and the relative times each photo was captured. Simply select a group of images that includes some with and some without GPS coordinate information, and click the Interpolate GPS Data button. GPS coordinates and location names will be calculated and added to the photos that didn't have this information.
Reverse lookup
When you have GPS coordinates for a photo, it is easy to determine exactly where it was taken, as GPS coordinates refer to a specific point on the planet. But what about all the photos you captured before you started utilizing GPS? Pro Photo Tools allows you to perform a "reverse lookup," determining GPS coordinates based on location name information.
To add GPS coordinate information to photos that don't have it:
- Make sure the fields in the Location section have been updated to reflect the location for each photo. Include as much information as possible to ensure accurate results.
- Then, with the photos selected, click the Get GPS Info button. Pro Photo Tools will use Windows Live Local to find the location for the images and add GPS coordinates to them.
At times, you might find it helpful to simply point to a map to identify where a photo was taken, and Pro Photo Tools allows you to do that as well. To start, select an image (or multiple images) that doesn't contain GPS coordinate information, and then click the Map Browse tab. Any images that don't contain GPS coordinate information will be shown in a filmstrip view at the bottom of the map. To specify a location for a photo using the map, right-click on the photo and click Find This Image on the Map from the popup menu. Using the map controls, navigate to the location where the photo was taken, and then click the Tag button at the top-right of the map. The GPS coordinates and location name information will be added to the photo.
Browse the map
Once you have applied various location information to your images, you can sit back and browse the map to revisit the location where you took the photos (virtually, anyway). When you go to the Map Browse tab, all currently open images that have GPS coordinate information will be plotted as pushpins on the map. You can navigate around, holding your mouse over any image to see a thumbnail for it. You can also double-click on a pushpin to zoom in and center the map on the location where that image was taken. You can even use the 3-D mode to perform a "fly by" of the location where you took your photos, complete with satellite terrain imagery.
Provide feedback!
Many of the features found in Pro Photo Tools were suggested by photographers just like you. If you have a cool feature you'd like to see added to Pro Photo Tools, or just an idea for something you'd like to see made possible for your digital photography workflow on Windows, we'd love to hear from you. You can send us an e-mail at prophoto@microsoft.com.
