would be nice if site got it's lat/lon from the photo

[roger]

Every site has a photo associated with it, and this is probably the nicest UW photo you took while diving the site. I also take a surface photo at the site, and when I do that with my iPhone or Olympus TG-1, the photo has the GPS location for the site. It would be nice if the dive site would take the dive location from that photo.

thanks!

[nick]

I can certainly look at doing that. Perhaps if you add an image to a site, and that site does not already have GPS information, it could check the image?

If you can fire me through an example that has GPS I'll look in to this for you.

[nick]

Ok.. quick update. I implemented this, based on a sample image I found. So if a site does not have GPS info already, it will copy from the image if you add it.

Would still be good to get a couple of your sample images though, to confirm the EXIF tags are all the same and everything works etc. Then I can send you through a beta to play with.

[honigferd]

I still have mine from a previous discussion about this topic in my public Dropbox folder you can use for testing:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/560 ... oTag/1.JPG
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/560 ... oTag/2.JPG
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/560 ... oTag/3.JPG
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/560 ... oTag/4.JPG
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/560 ... oTag/5.JPG
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/560 ... oTag/6.JPG
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/560 ... oTag/7.JPG

[nick]

Nice one - thanks! These seem to work and the site is updated near water, so that's a positive sign

I will include this in the next update. If you'd like to try out a beta, then drop me an email.

[roger]

wow, now that's service. Wish adobe treated me this well, and I paid like 40x the price for photoshop over the years.

I'll post 2 images to test tonight when I have a little more time, running off to work, one from iphone, one from Oly TG1.

By the way, if you are using Aperture for your images, you can pretty easily make a gps track out of a couple of iphone images and then drop that track onto a folder of images from another camera and transfer the GPS info to the untagged photos. It will do it based on time stamps, so it works over a full day with multiple sites.

nick, for those who would rather have an underwater photo tagging their site, could you add a dialog asking if the user wants to update GPS location based on the photo? that way you can drag on a boring surface photo with GPS, get the GPS info, then replace that photo with an untagged underwater photo. Just a thought.

[nick]

I was considering something like that. Currently, if you already have GPS info, then there's no way to ever read the site, which doesn't seem great.

But at the same time - realistically, how often would you tag the GPS of a site, and then want to use the GPS from a photo? Is this likely to be a common thing?

If it is, then I can think of a couple of options.

1. Kind of clunky, but maybe a button to "read GPS from current image".

2. A dialog asking if you'd like to use it (if the info exists), with optional "don't ask again", "always use", etc. But that might confuse people when things change behind them.

3. Always use it. Which might again confuse people or overwrite valid coordinates.

4. Leave it as-is, where it uses the info by default provided no coordinates have already been entered. What I like about this is that it doesn't overwrite anything, or get in the way. What I don't really like is that it provides no way to refresh your coordinates from the image if you decide the image is more accurate or whatever.

Open to other suggestions..

[roger]

I took 2 more photos, both in the same location, sadly far from water. one from an iphone, one from an olympus tg-1.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/26835321/iphone.JPG

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/268 ... 20TG-1.JPG

thanks again for the discussion on GPS, I really appreciate the support. I'm a data geek, I freely admit this is my own personal itch and others might think I'm nuts, but then, macdive is pretty much built for data geeks, so others may like this.

I really like taking a photo with my iPhone or with my TG-1, my deck camera, to record site location. Sometimes I just write down the name of the site on a notecard and take a photo of that. It's a very lazy fast way to record the info for later.

But I really like paging through my site page and seeing a bunch of underwater photos. It's much cooler and has a lot more meaning than a bunch of distant horizons. But sometimes those surface photos are nice, too.

So how about this solution: *two* photos associated with every site. Underwater Photo, Surface Photo. A radio button to select which photo is used as the key photo for the site if both photos exist, and a checkbox that says "use GPS from surface photo for site location".

But really, anything will work, anything will be quicker than a bunch of cutting and pasting or driving around maps with crosshairs.

thanks again.

[nick]

Thanks - those photos load in fine. Strange place to dive, but I'll go with it

For now, I've put a "Check image for GPS" button underneath the map, in the Site Inspector. So.. hopefully, at least as an initial version, this will help. It means for any sites with no GPS, you can just drag your image and they'll get updated. For those that already have an image, or you change the image, then you can just hit the button to refresh.

It's not the most awesome solution, but it should at least get you started and we can tweak it from there.

[honigferd]

Hooray! Thanks!