RouteScout - a Ground Imagery TalonView Plug-In

RouteScout is a Win XP and Win7 tool for easy geotagged collection of imagery, video, audio notes, and other metadata following methods and content based on a decade of use in the DoS. RouteScout is in two parts, software that integrates ground imagery into FalconView and TalonView as well as allowing mission planning and routing integration between Garmin Nuvi, Oregon, and Colorado personal navigation devices. A spatial imagery solution collected at the squad level for sharing within the platoon and company mission planning and briefing process. RouteSocut is an easy to use process relying on in-situ digital cameras and in pocket GPS data loggers. It contributes geotagged images, MP3 audio alerts and notes, points of interest, as well as routes to dismounted teams who rely on COTs personal navigation devices from Garmin.

Tibet in the News - Spreading the Word

Tibet News...

Auto-tagging - Faces with Places

http://www.news.com/8301-13580_3-9816371-39.html

Get ready for a new era in which your camera knows not just when you took a picture but who's in it, too.

Many cameras today can detect the faces of those being photographed, which is handy for guiding the camera to set its exposure, focus, and color balance properly. But the more difficult challenge of face recognition is more useful after the photo has been taken.

That's because of a concept called autotagging, one of a number of technologies that make digital photography qualitatively different from the film photography of the past.

Tags of descriptive data can be attached to digital photos, and they help people find and organize pictures. The only problem is that tagging your photos, today a laborious manual task, is like eating your vegetables. It's good for you but a lot of people don't like it.

With autotagging, the camera attaches tags as the pictures are taken. Today, cameras embed timestamps in photos, which makes it possible to sift through pictures by date. But be honest here--how reliably can you remember exactly when you took that picture of your darling daughter a year or two ago that you'd like to e-mail to her grandparents? Being able to screen for photos only of a particular person could dramatically speed up the search process.

One camera maker willing to mention its interest in autotagging is Panasonic. "A lot of thought is going into how to tag photos so you can retrieve them at a moment's notice," said Alex Fried, national marketing manager for imaging at Panasonic's Consumer Electronics Co. But he wouldn't go into specifics: "There are things we have in the works that will help benefit consumers going forward."

And faces aren't the only aspect of autotagging that's likely to show up in cameras. Location, too, is another useful attribute that can be attached to photos through a process called geotagging. Geotagging can be used both to look for photos whose location you know and to figure out what exactly is in a photo you already have at hand.

Today, geotagging is generally a laborious manual task that requires geographic data to be merged with photos after the fact using a computer. But more power-efficient approaches will lead to in-camera GPS systems that will enable automatic geotagging, predicted Kanwar Chadha, founder of GPS chip designer SiRF Technology.

"A location stamp is much more important than a time stamp in most cases. A year down the road, you have no idea where those pictures were taken and no way to search for location," Chadha said.

A short story on Panoramio

Panoramio Beautiful Geo-Images (blog)

"To see our small project grow from its birth for year and means has been a hallucinating experience, with this step and the continuous support of the users, we hoped that it grows still more." (translated from spanish by Google) - Jose, Joaquin and Eduardo, May 31, 2007

(c) Kyryrl

Eduardo's spainsh Blog - Look him up on via Google and you can get a translation too! (Eduardo writes Panoramio's Changes/Innovations Blog)

September 20th, 2007 by Eduardo Manchón

Yesterday 300,000 new photos from Panoramio were added to Google Earth, that means that the total number of photos in Google Earth is 2 million right now.

August 21st, 2007 by Eduardo Manchón

Good news! Finally photos up to ID 2,900,000 have been added to Google Earth. This means that more than 500,000 new photos have been added to Google Earth and this is the biggest update we ever did. Now the total number of photos from Panoramio in Google Earth is 1,7 million. Next update will be around September 20th.

June 27th, 2007 by Eduardo Manchón

Yesterday around 200,000 new photos were added to Panoramio’s layer inside Google Earth. Now the number of photos from Panoramio in Google Earth is around 1,2 million. With some exceptions, photos up to ID 2,000,000 have been included. This means around 2/3 of all photos uploaded to Panoramio up to this ID have been sent to Google Earth (e.g. photo with URL: http://www.panoramio.com/photo/1892099 has ID: 1,892,099).

If your photo has a higher ID than 2,000,000 you need to wait some weeks until the next update, expected for middle July, that will be larger and I hope will help catch on the delay.

June 27th, 2007 by Eduardo Manchón

Only three months ago we announced that Panoramio had reached one million photos. Today I am very happy to write that the number of photos has doubled and reached 2 million.

May 31st, 2007 by Eduardo Manchón

We are very (and we mean very) happy to announce that Panoramio will be acquired by Google.

April 24th, 2007 by Eduardo Manchón

Finally the new update is done. We sent to Google Earth a selection of photos up to ID: 1,710,000. Approximately 3/4 of the photos uploaded to Panoramio were sent to Google Earth. Thas is almost one million photos (973,949), the double number of photos than the previous update that reached ID: 655,000.

February 17th, 2007 by Eduardo Manchón

Today Panoramio’s layer at Google Earth was updated. Previously there were 80.000 photos from Panoramio visible in Google Earth by default, now 400.000 photos are included. There is a great chance to find photos from almost every place on Earth.
The selection of the 400.000 photos included photos until ID:655.000

December 11th, 2006 by Eduardo Manchón

Official Google Blog announced last Saturday that Google Earth has added a new “Geographic web” layer that includes articles from Wikipedia, comments from GE community and photos from Panoramio.

August 25th, 2006 by Eduardo Manchón

Thomas de Lange Wenneck has a GPS attached to his camara. When he takes a photo the coordinates of the place are automatically stored in the EXIF information of the image file. Later he just needs to upload his photos to Panoramio and they are automatically located in the map. No need to map the photo manually with Panoramio’s drag and drop interface.

July 5th, 2006 by Eduardo Manchón

We were adding some new features to Panoramio the last week:
- Photos with geodata in EXIF are automatically located in Panoramio, so you don’t need to do anything but upload the photo if it has the GPS coordinates in their EXIF tags.
- Mislocated?. Suggest a new location: Since there are many people correcting wrong

November 28th, 2005 by Joaquín Cuenca Abela

He asked, I deliver.
Do you have a ton of photos that you want to show in a map? Worried your pictures will soon fade away from the home page of panoramio to some hard to find page?
Now you can restrict the photos in panoramio to those of a particular user.

October 23rd, 2005 by Joaquín Cuenca Abela

Stefan Geens suggested to publish a KML Network Link with the latest pictures of Panoramio.
I did not know what is a KML Network Link, but it sounds cool, so I looked up the documentation, and implemented a KML Network Link for Panoramio.
How does it work?

September 27th, 2005 by Joaquín Cuenca Abela

Some people have asked in the forum for a way to have Panoramio on
their site. So I went for an easier solution for all of you. I just
cooked a mini panoramio version, ready to be used on iframes outside
Panoramio.

An example is:

This is what you need to write in your site:
<iframe src=”http://www.panoramio.com/plugin.php?
lt=43.406295&amp;ln=-2.686586&amp;z=3&amp;k=1″ width=”446px” height=”300px”></iframe>

Blue2CAN - Take the Picture. Get the Point!

"Photos That Know Where They Were Taken"

Here's how to use geotagging to add location data to your image files.

Part 1 of a special five-part series
Digital Focus - PC World
Dave Johnon
Tuesday, June 26, 2007 1:00 AM PDT

I remember showing photos of my trek through Grand Cayman to a friend a few years ago. "Where were these taken?" she asked me about a particular set of photos. "Hmm," I replied, "I don't remember. The East End, I think. I took so many photos, I can't keep track." At the time, I wished there was some automatic way to tag my photos with location information, so I'd always know where they were taken. Yet another thing I'd never have to remember ever again!

Well, my wish has come true: Geotagging is here. Geotagging is the term for adding location information to your photo files--and it's one of the coolest things ever to happen to digital photography.

The available solutions range from amazingly elegant to somewhat less elegant. Take Red Hen's Blue2Can, for example. In my experience, there's no better geotagging solution.

GeoTagging With NIKON

Put a Billion Dollar System to Use

From Zombie Dinosaurs by Dave Johnson... you know the one?

A few years ago, I went on a little photo trek and showed off the photos. I vividly remember getting grilled about the various locations by a friend of mine. “Where were these taken?” she asked me about a particular set of photos. “Hmm,” I replied, “I don’t remember. I took so many photos, I can’t keep track.” If only there was some automatic way to tag my photos with location information, so they’d be able to tell me where they were taken. Yet another thing I’d never have to remember ever again!.....

I’ve recently been experimenting with what is surely the most elegant geotagging tool ever made. I’m talking about Red Hen’s Blue2CAN.

In my experience, a better geotagging solution does not exist. It’s a small gadget about the size of your thumb that plugs into a small port on the front of several Nikon Digital SLRs, including the D200, D2X, D2Xs and D2Hs. It communicates wirelessly to any Bluetooth GPS receiver (like the kind that comes with inexpensive navigation programs and sits on your dashboard).

Geotagging and Related Statistics - Flickr

Geotagging Statistics - Flickr hits 500 million today, Photobucket two billion over, and Kodak's EasyShare +One billion

In my ongoing effort to consolidate whatever statistics on photo blogging and related geotagging, I ran accross this:

http://www.zmarties.com/picasa/blog/2007/05/500-millionth-photo-uploaded-to-flickr.html

And the winner is: Flickr hits 500 million images

Other rumors - Kodak Easyshare is a billion plus and Photobucket is better than twice that again... and that is only a small fraction of what likely is floating around out there...

Senators Seek Better Defense Imagery
Senators Seek Better Imagery

Committee Wants More Photos, Video and Maps Available to Troops in Field

By Walter Pincus

Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 6, 2006; Page A13

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence wants to expand the mission of the nation's imagery intelligence agency so that it can provide U.S. forces on the ground with laptop computers that display still pictures and video of what may lie over the next hill.

"New products including full-motion video and ground-based photography should be included with available positional data [such as maps] in National Geospatial-Intelligence libraries for retrieval on Defense Department and intelligence community networks," the Senate panel said in its report on the fiscal 2007 intelligence authorization bill.

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence wants to expand the mission of the nation's imagery intelligence agency so that it can provide U.S. forces on the ground with laptop computers that display still pictures and video of what may lie over the next hill.

"New products including full-motion video and ground-based photography should be included with available positional data [such as maps] in National Geospatial-Intelligence libraries for retrieval on Defense Department and intelligence community networks," the Senate panel said in its report on the fiscal 2007 intelligence authorization bill.

"The committee wants troops to be able to dial up what the route ahead will look like and where potential ambush points may be," said John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org, an expert in satellite- and ground-based intelligence. He said digital still photos taken by military attachés and Special Forces teams that have slipped in and out of potential target countries such as Iran and North Korea as well as video footage taken by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been collected for years, but have not been integrated into the main data libraries maintained by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA).

"The NGA's current library of geospatial products reflects its heritage -- predominantly overhead imagery and mapping products," the committee wrote in its report. "While the NGA is beginning to incorporate more airborne and commercial imagery, its products are nearly devoid of FMV [full-motion video] and ground-based photography," it added.

The panel's solution is to give the director of national intelligence authority to direct the NGA to "analyze, disseminate and incorporate" into its national system "likenesses, videos, or presentations produced by ground-based platforms including handheld or clandestine photography taken by or on behalf of human intelligence collection organizations."

The new visual materials would be available along with traditional mapping data for retrieval by mission planners and troops in the field. "The route to and from a facility or photographs of what a facility would look like to a foot soldier -- rather than from an aircraft -- would be of immense value to our military personnel and intelligence officers," the report said.

Sensitive to the unique roles played by human collectors, including Special Forces teams and clandestine CIA operatives, the report made clear that the NGA's new mission would not give the agency authority to "manage or direct" the collection or set the technical requirements for "handheld or clandestine photography." The human collection agencies would also control the classification of their photography as well as how and to whom it is distributed.

Instead, the panel encouraged the NGA, whose database includes the exact location of where images are taken and the timing, to work with the other collection agencies so their data can easily be retrievable from the National Geospatial data libraries.

Pike said, however, that technical difficulties exist in finding ways to integrate the new collection into the NGA data libraries. "Lots of still-camera imagery does not have time and place stamped into it as do the satellites," he said. He also noted that full-motion videos, where a UAV can be traveling 100 mph, creates a problem in stamping locations so viewers know the start and finish of the target.

An NGA spokesman said the agency does not comment on pending legislation such as the Senate intelligence committee's version of the authorization bill. But the NGA has been making changes in its databases over the past few years. More commercial imagery has been purchased and some video from UAVs such at the Predator and Global Hawk have gone into the system.

Last December, Director of National Intelligence John D. Negroponte gave the NGA responsibility for overhead, non-imagery infrared and space-borne collectors of measurement and signature intelligence, which involves sensors that, among other things, gather signs of chemical, electronic, nuclear or other radiations emitters.

The NGA also has linked elements of its group with the National Security Agency, whose satellites and ground-based facilities collect electronic messages. Negroponte recently praised this step as "linking our nation's 'eyes and ears.' "

In a presentation last September, retired Lt. Gen. James R. Clapper Jr., the head of the NGA, described his view of "geointellingence" as seeking to answer such questions as "Where am I? Where are the friendlies? Where are the enemies? Where are the noncombatants? Where are the obstacles, natural and manmade, and how do I navigate among them? And what is the environment?"

Clapper, who became director of the NGA in 2001 when it was still the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, plans to retire this month.

Nikon GeoTagging DX-GPS

The Red Hen Systems DX-GPS is an integrated solution for tagging Nikon digital still images with GPS data. Using a consumer, off-the-shelf GPS, Garmin Geko 301 unit and the industry leading Nikon D2Xs, D2X & D200 camera, the DX-GPS allows users to directly capture geospatially referenced images in the easiest, most reliable collection method today.

Information captured in the EXIF metadata of the JPEG image file can be read by Red Hen Systems’ MediaMapper and PixPoint for ArcGIS to create map features linked directly to the photo file.

Features & Benefits

• GPS mounts on top of the camera putting it in full view of satellites for maximum accuracy.
• Records Latitude, Longitude and Altitude data to EXIF header of each JPG image.
• Physical integration provides for hands-free use.
• Instantly inspect and view GPS data on the camera LCD.
• User interface on GPS allows for setting adjustments, verifying satellite acquisition and accuracy.
• Industry standard GPS-data tagging offers compatibility with most GIS systems.

Requires a Nikon D2Xs, D2X, D2H or D200 camera.

ISDE5 - aka International GeoTaggers Conference?

Calling all photo-geographers, geo-photographers, and pointographers!!
.


The "earth first" potential of the NASA/Google alliance takes on additional significance given the wide blog-o-sphere announcement of the International Symposium on Digital Earth get-together in San Francisco in this coming June.

On June 5th 2007, the 5th International Symposium on Digital Earth (ISDE5) will open in the Bay Area of San Francisco, California, USA. The symposium will span four days and will address a broad national and international audience across a spectrum of industry, academic, government, and citizen attendees. All individuals who share a common interest in the concept of a digital Earth are urged to participate and attend. The Digital Earth vision embraces a philosophy that any citizen of the planet, linked through the Internet, should be able to freely access a virtual world of information and knowledge resources.

This philosophy supports the dream of ubiquitous education for the people of the planet. A rich convergence of technological advances, active visionaries, and recognition of the paramount need for humans to better understand the Earth and its systems comprises the character and history of this dynamic and exciting enterprise.

This international vision encompasses the virtual and 3-D representation of the earth with vast amounts of scientific, natural, and cultural information that is partially referenced and interconnected with digital knowledge archives from around the planet to describe and understand the Earth, its systems, and human activities.

The Digital Earth community is dedicated to building a virtual global commons to promote "down to Earth" solutions supported by cooperative web-based protocols using standards, databases, analytical and visualization tools that will foster the creation of appropriate applications for a sustainable future. A consortium of global experts founded the International Society for Digital Earth in 2006 to promote the evolution and implementation of the Digital Earth vision.

5th International Symposium on Digital Earth

ISDE5 Nominations

I would like to nominate two candidates that should be IMHO noted contributors to the "down to earth"contributions.

Global Biodiversity Information Facility
(with Google Earth bio-mash)

The GBIF GE Bio-Mash - or where are all those critters?/

The Global Biodiversity Information Facility is building a Internet accessible link to literally millions of "specimens". Most of the world's biologic diversity is located in the developing regions where as the dominate archive of those bio-diverse regions are held within developed nations. Essentially the GBIF is geotagging as much of the known via Google Earth. Put a time line on the collection and its classification and patterns may emerge? Give a HOOT! Don't pollute!

Good managers of natural resources and policy-makers know that their best decisions are based on results from the most accurate scientific analyses. Such analyses are based on solid, documentable data that have been recorded directly from the observation of nature. Such records are called 'primary' data. Biodiversity is a handy, one-word name for all the species on the Earth, the genetic variety they possess, and the ecological systems in which they participate. Another way of thinking about biodiversity is as the 'living resources' portion of 'natural resources'.

A large part of the primary data on biodiversity are the 1.5 - 2.0 billion specimens held in natural history collections, as well as many geographical and ecological observations recorded by various means and stored in various media. In making living resource policy and management choices, decision-makers are often forced to rely on analyses that are not based on primary data. This is because the world's store of primary data about biodiversity is not at present readily and easily accessible.

Biodiversity is found around the world - there are micro-organisms between granules of rock 3 km below the Earth's surface, rootless plants in the Atacama Desert, thousands of species of beetles in a single rain forest tree. However, biodiversity is not distributed evenly across the face of the planet. An estimated 75% of all species are found in the developing world.

Information about biodiversity (natural history collections, library materials, databases) likewise is not distributed evenly around the globe. Three-quarters or more of data about biodiversity are stored in the developed world. However, most of the data that may be needed can't be transferred because either they are not digitised, or capacity to handle digital information is lacking, or both. Facilitating digitisation and global dissemination of primary biodiversity data, so that people from all countries can benefit from the use of the information, is the mission of the (GBIF).

Conservation Air Patrol
(With National Geographic geotagged images)

Conservation Air Patrol

My second nominee group, the Conservation Air Patrol, transverses Africa counting animals, documenting environmental degradation, and from what I hear swatting flies while getting the job done. Read about then add the National Geographic "MegaFlyover" to your Google earth via National Geographic and Wildlife Conservation Societies, “MegaFlyover”. This team plus National Geographic should be considered as enabling one of the original Mash-up".

Google and NASA - geoTagging via GE just gets better

http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/12-18-2006/0004493013&EDATE=

NASA and Google to Bring Space Exploration Down to Earth
MOFFETT FIELD, Calif., Dec. 18
/PRNewswire/ --

NASA Ames Research Center and Google have signed a Space Act Agreement that formally
establishes a relationship to work together on a variety of challenging technical problems ranging from large-scale data management and massively distributed computing, to human-computer interfaces.

As the first in a series of joint collaborations, Google and Ames will focus on making the most useful of NASA's information available on the Internet. Real-time weather visualization and forecasting, high-resolution 3- D maps of the moon and Mars, real-time tracking of the International Space Station and the space shuttle will be explored in the future.

"This agreement between NASA and Google will soon allow every American to experience a virtual flight over the surface of the moon or through the canyons of Mars," said NASA Administrator Michael Griffin at Headquarters in Washington. "This innovative combination of information technology and space science will make NASA's space exploration work accessible to
everyone," added Griffin. "Partnering with NASA made perfect sense for Google, as it has a wealth of technical expertise and data that will be of great use to Google as we look to tackle many computing issues on behalf of our users," said Eric Schmidt, chief executive officer of Google. "We're pleased to move forward to collaborate on a variety of technical challenges through the signing of the Space Act Agreement."

Recently, teams from NASA and Google met to discuss the many challenging computer science problems facing both organizations and possible joint collaborations that could help address them. NASA and Google intend to collaborate in a variety of areas, including incorporating agency data sets in Google Earth, focusing on user studies and cognitive modeling for human computer interaction, and science data search utilizing a variety of Google features and products.

"Our collaboration with Google will demonstrate that the private and public sectors can accomplish great things together," said S. Pete Worden, Ames center director. "I want NASA Ames to establish partnerships with the private sector that will encourage innovation, while advancing the Vision for Space Exploration and commercial interests," Worden added.
"NASA has collected and processed more information about our planet and universe than any other entity in the history of humanity," said Chris C. Kemp, director of strategic business development at Ames. "Even though this information was collected for the benefit of everyone, and much is in the public domain, the vast majority of this information is scattered and
difficult for non-experts to access and to understand. "We've worked hard over the past year to implement an agreement that enables NASA and Google to work closely together on a wide range of innovative collaborations," said Kemp. "We are bringing together some of the best research scientists and engineers to form teams to make more of NASA's vast information accessible."

NASA and Google also are finalizing details for additional collaborations that include joint research, products, facilities, education and missions. Google's innovative search technologies connect millions of people around the world with information every day. Google is headquartered close to Ames in Silicon Valley with offices through the Americas, Europe and
Asia.

For more information about Google, please visit:
http://www.google.com
For information about NASA and agency programs, please visit:
http://www.nasa.gov

Comming Soon....

GeoTagging Tourism

Dr Joe Berry dropped an interesting "photo-map-lett" on my desk today - geoTagging Tourism. The idea is to create, in this case, a resort "photo-map" of places within the resort and those adajacent so that guests can both find and see what might be available. The result is suggested below and is a HTML page generated by MediaMapper.

http://63.78.10.20/basis/MMMaps/LosAbrigados/

This example, a resort in the Southwest, was created by a walk-around geo-pointograher (non-professional point-and-shootist with GPS) and then assembled in MediaMapper. The images were geotagged and organized into two general groups: day-shots (red dot) and night-shots (black-dot). The black and white background imagery comes from Microsoft's Terraserver USA and the color block clipped from Google Earth and added/reqistered with in MediaMapper (this might be a strech on the GE license?). Some instructions were added and then the HTML generated.

Total time from start to posting the HTML - likley an hour or two no more - including the walk-about. Value to the resort - maybe not priceless but still valuable if seasonality or specialized content for a group's venue counts?

The resulting web page provides both tumb-nail and map cross-reference: click on a map point and the image is identified; click on an image and its placement is highlighted. Try the link above!

MicroSoft TerraServer USA - http://terraserver.microsoft.com/

Google Earth - http://earth.google.com/

Mediamapper - http://www.mediamapper.com

Dr Joe Berry - http://www.innovativegis.com/basis/

Flickr - One Way Only?

Excuse my absence. Been busy moving.

I do have an observation that really has me a bit disturbed on the apparent one-way-ization of Flickr images. While exploring the Flickr "tagging" phenomena I discovered that when you down-load a Flickr image, either mine or other shared images, they arrive essentially stripped of all their tags including normal EXIF data they started with? I guess the Yahoo outfit does not like the idea that tagged images might be used elsewhere? There must be money "money in-them-thar Flickr images"? Once they got you by your pictures, the rest soon follows?

On the other hand, images that I have good EXIF data in when shared via Picasa.net retains the EXIF metadata - up and down. Only "detail" is you need to download a shared catalog with Picasa. But once they are on your local drive, you can work with them via Adobe and other image processing tools.

I prefer the Picasa.net design and attitude towards sharing an image's metadata: keep your images on your own storage, upload only the ones you really want to share, and then pass around the proper link to your shared catalogs. Those that download your shared catalogs get the metadata as well.

If you want to explore some of the differences between Flickr and Picasa.Net take a read at:

http://retrovirus.com/incr/

"First step: get the photos into Picasa, Google’s excellent free Windows photo organizer. I used FlickrDown to download the photoset from Flickr to my Windows box. It was simple, though I was sad that there was no way to preserve my photos’ tags. I then downloaded the new version of Picasa from the Picasa Web Albums site. (You need to get this specific version to be able to do the fancy stuff I’m about to describe.) Picasa immediately found and imported the downloaded photos—so far, so good."

geoTagging eRRors an d Bias

I have been inspecting the results of the registering of my collections, aka catalogs, of geoEXIFed imagery placed into Google Earth by several pathways. To frame this story -

I have a tad over 11,000 geoEXIFed and other geo-tagged images collected during the last decade. My spatial image inventory has been collected with the various Red Hen Systems tools. Recently I have also been collecting from the WEB goe-spatial images shared via Flickr and Google Earth. I have also used Picasa.NET to move reospatial images around.

I also have spatial video, maybe 120 hours in aggregate - I have a couple of legacy tapes pending as my "one/first" Maxtor external 250GB external is pretty much full-up. With much procastination, blood, sweat, tears, and hours I have so far sucessfully rendered that stack of video down to 28 clips totalling 135 minutes of 30fps NSTC, PAL and MPEG-2 videos explaining maybe four or five stories or themes. Today, I am browsing that imagery via Picasa.NET and Adobe's Lightroom Beta. I have leared to be reasonably productive with Adobe Premier for the video. Red Hen imagery and video mapping products have contributed the spatial slice-and-dice environment as well as generation of ESRI personal geobase, HTML and Flash cartographic work-products. How many CODECs? Wouldn't bet it was less than a half-dozen? I want to find an easy way to do the same within Google Maps.

I was able to join in Picasa NET Beta some months ago and was excited when I found the "Geotag > View in Google Earth" Tool option. It didn't initially work (accept images) but offered the opportunity. Today the "View in Google Earth" Picasa.NET option does a reasonable job although in some places it is still a bit rough IMHO - like no obvious "Blogger" map in this Beta . While I can not fully endorse Picasa, the more I use it the better the results I get. The .NET version remains in Beta, you'll need to have a gmail account, and expect an update say every three to six weeks?

My 11,000 geotagged images come with all sorts of legacies, collection methods, GPS accuracies, and geoEXIFing method. These are a few of the sources that can contribute positional wobble and uncertainty to an image's absolute position. How much accuracy does a geo-photo require? It depends. And when combined, these errors and those found within Google Earth/Maps and the GIS sciences generally, sometimes disappoint expectations. I too have been disappointed and to channel frustration, I am trying to understand the various sources of pure bias, trend, and residual error as a worthy interest. For the GISer this is table-speak as we are longer toothed on issues of GPS and how to lie with maps. To better understand camera wobble - the photography domain I seek illumination. The next several notes following will try to explain what I have seen and what I think may be going on.

GPS WObble

In the "old" days, before WAAS and when SA=ON, GPS position was guaranteed to be 100 meters off at any time (2RMS) and as much as 300 meters off on the 3RMS+ extremes. My posting experience suggests that the GPS WObble for that era was more typically 20-40 meters.

More recently, GPS accuracy has improved from 100 to three meters, cost per device are under $150, and form is the size of a matchbook. My preferred GPS solution these days are SiRFstarIII chip-sets which delivers 20-channel, massively correlated and WAAS corrected NMEA strings over Bluetooth.

What sort of accuracy should we expect with current SiRFstar III Bluetooth GPS devices? There are many relative and absolute position qualities I could digress to but for now lets assume good WGS84 certainty at the street level. The GPS accuracy is a positional accuracy of a few meters. An operationally good GPS condition would indicate PDOP is low (<2),>6), each with matching RTCM differentials that are both tight in space and latency. These conditions when matched to smart GPS software calculating an over-determined solution, the SiRFstarIII chip-set should be delivering antenna location in WGS Lat/long six decimal precision to within three meters at 2RMS and under one meter CEP or half the time. Is this good enough? One meter gets you there when ten will not? Seems good for me but maybe a serious geo-cacher might drop in on us and set the story right? As for elevation error or noise, a rule-of-thumb is 2-3 times the X/Y 2RMS error.

In my spatial image collection, a good portion have PDOP as well as the presence or absence of the WAAS or other RTCM differentials. These are indices of GPS performance. For some elite catalogs with well populated EXIF headers there will be images with orientation, distance to POI, edition information, image adjustment, and other tags. In some cases, the image might have associated sensors and both their data records plus their meta data. Neither that fit well a standard EXIF structure. In this case, innovation has required a GPS "LOG" or companion files that includes both NMEA and $ proprietary strings.

Squinty Eyes and Picture WObble

As far as resolution of my geoEXIFed catalog, I have lots of VGA, 1.3 mega pixel, and five mega pixel JPEGs. I have five mega pixel hand-camera for years now and have almost gone SLR at home. As a point-and-shoot pointographer the sweet-spot 3.5 mp image seems the more likely adjustment via my next smartphone. I have used many versions of Nokia camera phones and have a Fuji five mega pixel FinePix must be four years old now. Its handled the abuse well although I have acquired some sort of fungus that is devouring something that supports the display. Pixels are dieing in a hyphael pattern. I am learning how to improve poor images. Picasa is does an Ok job but I prefer the feel, organization, and quality offered in Adobe's Lightroom Beta. I know how to fix some of the issues of digital camera error - white balance, lens jitter, lighting issues, and other cool stuff I too can move sliders and embellish "my" imagery.

Hard-knocks experience tells me its time to move beyond JPEG or even JPEG2000. I like what Microsoft is doing with SeaDragon, Windows Media Photo and Photosynth. These are products from their Media Lab's propeller heads and will soon appear with Microsoft's next-generation of OS.

I also have some other odd-sets received mostly from friends - all but a scant few via CD. I a very small but growing inventory of images received from the Internet via sharing. I really like immersive imagery and when well-done, I could digg 3D. So much so watch this space for more on 3D-immersion! I only print to paper a small number of images say 1:500. I am starting to get quite excited about the sharing of images as a digital proxy for paper printing.

I am certain I am finding location wobble that likely others have or are facing both knowing and not. This "wobble" should be considered a new source of lens jitter in digital imaging. Solution? Good technique and/or innovative technology can minimize this. Further each method to geoEXIF the image have both common sources of error and well as significant limitations.

I want an easy way to minimise duplication of my media. But I also want a reliable way to re-organize my work products to my camera phone and allow easy creation of CDs, DVDs, and external disk storage for my use and for my clients. I am finding it too easy in my processing to create duplicates. Worse is the related fear to delete something you know you don't need but are uncertain if you have consolidated all of the changes... and other subconscious Delete - are you certain? fears. And duplicates in Picasa are very confusing IMHO. The have a stub for dupes but I have yet to see a understandable result. So I will await the update?