EXIF data in aerial pictures

[Simbamangu]

Just finished going through (very very tediously) several hundred aerial pictures from a hippo count in Zambia - used a Nikon D200 with a Garmin GPS attached by cable. The EXIF data for each picture (embedded within the JPG) has lat/lon information.

I was putting together a table of JPG filenames and the lat/lon information, which is what took so much time (reading the GPS data in Nikon View and entering it into Excel).

Does anyone know of an application that would extract EXIF data and make a table from it, automating this process?

Howard

[Simbamangu]

PS to the previous post ...

We have now tried GPS Photo-link (GPL) as well as the direct cable link for photographs to attach GPS data to pictures.

• GPL works pretty well, requires post-processing of course
• Cable link has advantage of directly attaching EXIF data the moment you take the shot, but the cable can be cumbersome.

Topofusion has a similar function to GPL, but doesn't export to ArcGIS / ArcView.

Howard

[julian...@gmail.com]

Have you tried googling exif metadata excel? There seems to be a number
of free utlities that will do what you're after.

Also, Picasa now supports geotagging - so you could just select your
hippo pictures and select Tools>Export to Google Eath File and you'll
have your picture metadata in a zipped XML file which you can open
with Excel with no effort at all. Oh, and needless to say, in Picasa
you can also point to Tools>View in Google Earth, and you'll have all
your pictures nicely displayed right where they were taken.

Hope this helps

On Nov 29, 10:47 am, Simbamangu <simbama...@gmail.com> wrote:
> PS to the previous post ...
>
> We have now tried GPS Photo-link (GPL) as well as the direct cable link for
> photographs to attach GPS data to pictures.
>

> - GPL works pretty well, requires post-processing of course
> - Cable link has advantage of directly attaching EXIF data the moment

[Simbamangu]

Hadn't tried that exact search, but came across several of the same apps.

Problem is: few of them will return the GPS data as part of the table, OR they return individual text files for each of my 850 pictures instead of one big text / dbf file!

One which seems to do all the required data extraction to the right kind of file (exif2htm) requires registration and their server for payment is down.

Sooooo ... I think I'll try the Picasa route and report back shortly!

Thanks.

Howard

[Simbamangu]

Alright ... after a fair bit more fiddling around, this is what I came up with:

ACDSee 7.0 has a 'database' menu, with the option to 'export: Generate file listing'. As long as you've set GPS data to be part of the 'details view' (Tools:Options:File List) then you get a text file which can be used by Access or Excel.

Sorted!

It should be possible to use Access to store the entire database of photos, too, come to think of it; would integrate a bit more easily into ArcGIS.



The big question in my mind for all of these digital photos taken from the survey aircraft, and then georeferenced, is accuracy - lag and offsets occur in a few steps.

• Human reaction time;
• Where the operator is pointing the camera (forward / back of aircraft position?);
• Shutter reaction time (<0.2s in most professional digitals these days);
• GPS data lag - up to 1 second, depending on GPS?
• Accuracy of the GPS reading itself.

Additive errors might end up >150m very quickly; not bad, but I've heard more than one person refer to georeferenced images as 'exact positions.'
What I'd like to do is take photos of known points on the ground and see just how close they are.

Howard