Mac.sis making macs and S60 handsets talk

Inspired by a beautiful autumn day last weekend, I took the entire family for a little walk in the nearby forest trails, with the intention of photographing autumn colors (and of course my pride and joy of a daughter) during the outing. I took my trusty old Canon EOS 400D with a 70-300mm Canon lense, and decided that it would be nice to geotag the photos I manage to take.

To my surprise, this worked beautifully, with the toolchain consisting solely of free utilities for S60 and my Mac. Here's what I did:

• When starting off, I created a new Workout (Walking) in Nokia Sports Tracker on my N82 and started the workout.
• I kept the workout running with the N82 throughout the walk and snapped away on my Canon.
• Back home, I downloaded the photos from the 400D to my Macbook as usual.
• I exported the Workout from Sports Tracker using the GPX format.
• I fired away the donationware GPSPhotoLinker, imported the GPX track, selected the photos and voilà! The photos had been accurately geotagged.

I used the Show on Map feature of Aperture to verify that the photos were, in fact, geocoded to the correct location. I was surprised how well GPSPhotoLinker performed the task. The only glitch was that I had to tweak the camera timezone setting a bit in GPSPhotoLinker to get the timestamps from the GPS track and the photo EXIF data to match.

The automated geotagging conveniently saves one manual step in my Aperture workflow. What I will do with the spared minutes is another matter entirely. Perhaps learn how to actually photograph?