After receiving a Garmin Edge 200 cycling GPS for Christmas I began to wonder if I could use it for geotagging my photographs. After doing a few side by side tests against my old Wintec WBT201 I was quite impressed with it’s precision and accuracy. The Garmin was definitely going to be the favoured device from now on. The only problem I had was how to read and use the proprietary fit file format.
Google told me that others had attempted this before. That solution seems to have been designed around linux and while it is all pretty much perl and it should have run on windows I just didn’t have the patience to get it working. I could see that the solution used the truly excellent exiftool by Phil Harvey. I also knew that there was a standalone windows executable for exiftool. Upon closer inspection I found that it could read GPS track logs in various formats and tag photos accordingly.
In the end I settled for just uploading the activity file to Garmin Connect, exporting it in GPX format and then using exiftool to batch process all the photos in the directory.
Update: After loading my geotagged pictures in to Picasa and then pressing the geotag button I was surprised to find that the photos were not showing the correct location. It seems that I had forgotten to check the time on the camera and it was out by almost 6 minutes. Exiftool came to the rescue again with its date/time shift feature
The Moose and Squirrel Files 