I had the opportunity to take a trip last year which covered the better part of Ireland.  While there, we had two cameras: a Nikon D70 DSLR and  a Sony DSC-N2.  More importantly though, I had a Sony GPS-CS1 geologger.  This little device locks onto GPS signals and records your location every 15 seconds in standard NMEA format to internal flash memory.  If you take the time to synchronize the internal clocks in your camera to GPS before you go shooting, afterwards you can correlate the time stamps in your photos with the position recorded by the device.  I use software by RoboGeo to do this, although Sony includes some basic software with the device.

The GPS latitude, longitude, and altitude gets written into the image’s EXIF data and can be used to display the photo on a google map.  The XML Google Maps plugin for WordPress can be used with the NextGEN Gallery plugin to do this.  I’ve uploaded just a couple of the over 800 photos we took on the trip, all of which are tagged with their locations.  The few that are shown here were taken at Connor Pass on the way to Dingle, on the west coast of Ireland.  Also a few are of the coast itself.  It’s pretty cool to see the jagged coastline from above in the google map and then see the first-hand photographs.

A feature I think would be useful in the XML Google Maps plugin, and I’m not sure the best way to do this, would be a way to highlight spots on the map where photos are closely bunched together and may not be totally obvious.  For instance, there are three photos closely bunched inland near Connor Pass which you can’t clearly distinguish without zooming in the map.  Maybe a small bubble with the number of photos hidden beneath the top photo?  All in all though, it’s a really sweet plugin.  I thought the google maps plugin for Gallery 2 was cool, but this works flawlessly.

I think I should also mention that there are other ways of recording your GPS location without using sony’s little gadget.  I only mention this because the GPS-CS1 tends to lose track pretty often, and if you want accurate locations, you have to hold it away from you to get a good track again before you snap a photo.  Basically, any handheld GPS device that can record waypoints would work just as well.  There are also more expensive systems that attach directly to Nikon and Canon high end digital cameras and talk directly to the camera to tag the photos.  But hey, I’m just a grad student.  I can’t afford that stuff, so the GPS-CS1 worked just fine.

The NextGEN plugin creates this nice list of photos:

while the XML Google Maps plugin uses the NextGEN gallery to create this sweet google map.  Click on the photos in the map to see descriptions, and be sure to zoom around and make use of all the features google maps have to offer!