As an avid photography enthusiast, I am always looking for new ways to spread my passion for pictures. So I began thinking, with all our know-how of GeoWeb capabilities here at concept3D and my personal habit of exploring random locations, why not combine the two skills and share with others my adventures in geoweb photography!

Recently, I had a chance to go to Los Angeles for some business and some fun. While there, I wanted to share my photo adventure of the places I went to with friends that were not there, and in order to do this, I needed to geo tag my photos with the locations of where I was shooting at. Normally, to geo tag my photos, I would need additional equipment or accessories that can provide this capability, but being that I am an enthusiast and not a professional, I did not want to spend the extra money to buy these items. Lucky for me, I had an iPhone with me with some free photo apps that automatically geotagged the pictures I took on my phone for me. The specific app that I used AirMe which uploads automatically to my picasaweb album with the geolocation included. There are many other photo apps out there that does the same thing such but I chose this as it gave me more options to which photo albums I could upload to.

Using the iPhone AirMe app, I made sure to take a reference shot for every photo I took with my Canon to mark all the locations that I was unfamiliar with. After I uploaded all my photos to my computer, I used a free photo management software from Google called Picasa and Google Earth to geotag all of my photos, using the photos that were uploaded to my picasaweb album to visually reference each location. (iPhoto can geotag photos for the Mac)

Then came the part of sharing my photos. Using, Picasa’s free online storage called picasaweb, I uploaded all my photos so they could be accessible to the public. And although picasaweb shows the location of my photos that I took in a Google Maps window on my album, I still felt that it did not portray the story I wanted to tell. Nothing will beat actually being there, but I felt that seeing these photo’s in a 3D environment would be much more enjoyable than a flat 2D reference. What I really wanted to do was show these photos in Google Earth. Since Picasa is a Google product, it does a good job integrating with other Google software, and it actually provides a link where you can download a kml that gets generated by your pictures which in turn can be read by the Google Earth client. (There is a bug with this where you need to change the name of the file you downloaded and add in your name and a .kml file type)

Then the lightbulb went off. With Google Earth’s 5.0’s new release adding in tour recording features and the Google Earth Web Browser plugin now supporting this feature, I can actually guide my audience with the vantage points where I made my shots. By going through, using the kml file I downloaded from my web album, and creating a video tour in Google Earth, uploading the kml file online, and even going as far as embedding it into a Google Earth Plugin using a Google Gadget mashup, I can better tell stories of my GeoWeb Photography Adventures.

Press Play and Enjoy!

In my next part, I will be talking about using my personal favorite web album, flickr, and using their geoRSS feeds to show dynamic, automatically updating photos in the Google Earth Plugin….