Nokia E71

Geotagging pictures made even easier

Laurent Bugnion — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 00:55:38 GMT

Some time ago, I wrote a blog post titled “Geocoding pictures automatically with Nokia E71 and gpicsync” which was explaining how to use the built-in GPS in your mobile phone (in my case a Nokia E71) and a utility program called gpisync to enter geographical tags into your pictures. This is useful because using a program supporting this feature (such as Flickr for example), you can then see all your pictures on a map, and remember where you took the pictures.

In the post, however, I mentioned that using gpisync was a bit painful, as this application was obviously developed by non professional software developers, had a bad user experience, etc…

Almost by chance, I found this other great utility software made by Microsoft and named Microsoft Pro Photo Tools.

This application is focused at allowing you to edit the EXIF tags in the picture. These tags are made to contain various information about the picture, such as name of the photographer, copyright, description, date, model of camera and many others such as the geotags mentioned before. The user experience is much better (though some aspects are a bit annoying still) and provides a really cool interface. If you didn’t record a GPS log of your movements while you were taking the pictures, or if you need to amend a location, a Virtual Earth integration is provided, and allows you to visualize the pictures directly on a map. Just like in the more primitive tool I mentioned before, you can also load GPS logs in various formats and geotag your pictures automatically.

I had never heard of this tool before, and was quite surprised to find it, but I have been using it avidly since then and can really recommend it to everyone.

Creating a random playlist with Zune and Windows Media Player

Laurent Bugnion — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 12:56:07 GMT

This is one of these silly things that I keep forgetting, so allow me to quickly jot it down so that I know where to look next time.

The issue is: How can you fill your mobile player with a random choice of music, when it is too small to fit all your collection. In my case, I use my new Nokia E71 phone as an occasional player for music. It is nice because it has integrated Bluetooth, and I have a Bluetooth stereo headset, so you can leave the phone in your pocket and listen wirelessly. In addition, you can also control the player (play, pause, skip, etc...). However, I have "only" a 2GB card in that, so no way my whole music collection will fit there.

Another issue is that Windows Media Player can be used to synchronize music of your choice to the E71 (simply mount it as a mass media storage, and WMP will automatically detect it). However, WMP cannot (at least to the best of my knowledge) create totally random playlists. Thankfully, the Zune player can do this. Let's see how:

Creating a playlist

In the Zune player, select Collection and then Music.

In the bottom, click on "New Autoplaylist".

Name the playlist, for example "E71Auto".
Set the settings as displayed. You can decided how many songs you want to add. It is unfortunate that you cannot choose a maximum size for the whole songs like you can do in WMP. I guess both platforms have their limitations, and I hope this will change some day.

Click on OK. The list is executed and your 300 songs appear. Note that they have been chose completely randomly.

Then we need to import the playlist in WMP. To do this, you simply need to copy it and change the extension.

Locate the playlist on your hard drive. It should be named "E71Auto.zpl".
Copy it and rename it to "E71Auto.wpl".

Double click on the copied playlist. This opens it in Windows Media Player.

At this stage, you can play the auto playlist if you like, or you can synchronize it with your mobile device.

Refreshing a playlist

If you're sick of hearing the same old songs over and over again, time to load some fresh tunes to your device.

Open the Zune player.
Under Collection / Music, you should see the Auto playlist you created the last time.
Right click and select "Refresh". This will load 300 different songs in the play list.
Again, locate the playlist E71Auto.zpl on your harddrive and copy it. Rename the copy to E71Auto.wpl and open it into Windows Media Player.

The process of having to copy the playlist from ZPL to WPL is really annoying, and I hope that the functionality of choosing random songs for an auto playlist will be added in WMP. Unfortunately, since this has been missing for so long, I don't expect this to happen soon. In the mean time, the workaround works...

Geocoding pictures automatically with Nokia E71 and gpicsync

Laurent Bugnion — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 21:28:40 GMT

Update: Since then I found a much better tool to geocode pictures and edit other information encoded directly within the picture: Microsoft Pro Photo Tools. I wrote a new blog post about this tool.

I want to make a small break in my usual Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation posts and talk about a technology holy grail I just achieved: Automatically geocoding the pictures I take before I post them to Flickr (or any other photo service, for that matter). I have been wanting to do that for a long time, and only recently achieved this. Let's see how.

Definition

First, let's define what geocoding is: It is the process of encoding the geographical coordinates (long, lat) of the location in which a picture was taking, directly inside the picture file.

This is not the same as geotagging, which is the process of encoding these coordinates outside of the picture file, for example in Flickr tags. When you post a picture on Flickr, you can position this picture on a map, and the location will automatically appear in the picture's tags. However, if you download this picture, the information is lost. In the contrary, geocoding will save the location directly in the file, and so it will be kept. Thankfully, Flickr doesn't only understand geotagging, it is also able to read information geocoded in a picture file, if you set it up to do so (we will see how in just a moment).

To geocode a location in a picture file, we use something called EXIF, which is a kind of meta data encoded inside a JPG file or other formats. This is for example where you find the date and time at which the pictures were taken, the camera brand, if the flash was used or not, etc... EXIF is a standard which is very convenient. Writing an application reading and even writing EXIF information is not very difficult in .NET, in fact I did that some time ago for a web application I was working on.

Setting up Flickr to understand geocodes

As I said, Flickr is able to understand geocodes encoded in an EXIF header, but you must set it up to do so. This is very easy:

Navigate to your Flickr account and sign in
Under "You", select "Your account"
Choose the tab "Privacy and permissions"
Scroll down until you find "Import EXIF location data" and set it to yes.

This setting is off by default, because some pictures are automatically geocoded, and you may not want to share this information with everyone just like that.

Getting the geographical information

The main issue we have here is that most cameras on the market don't have a GPS built in. Some cameras do, however, and you can get the geo information directly encoded in the pictures as they are taken. This is obviously the easiest way, and then you just need to upload the pictures to Flickr to see them appear on the map.

However, if you don't have a GPS-camera, you can use a GPS recorder to acquire the geographical data. While some GPS modules allow you to do that, I used my Nokia E71 to fulfill this operation. This phone has a built in GPS that you can use to visualize your location at all times. This alone is still not enough to record the data, though, and this is where the Nokia research labs help you: A free application called Nokia Sports Tracker exists, that you can download and install from here:

http://research.nokia.com/research/projects/SportsTracker/

This app is very easy to install, and lets you record "sport activities", which in our case are not very sportive, but nevermind.

Before you start, make sure that the clock on the camera and the clock on the phone are synchronized. This is important because we will use the timestamp to get the picture's location. Note that if you forget this, you can correct the time difference later.
Start the Nokia Sports Tracker application on your E71.

Select a New Workout

Set the options. Depending on your activity, you can for example select
- Activity: Walking
- Live sharing: No
- Route: None
- Autolap: Off
- Target: None
- Replay: None

Press on OK and then on Start. Your position will now be recorded. You can leave the recording run in the background. Last time I tried, I recorded for more than 5 hours without a glitch.

Taking pictures

This part is pretty straightforward :)

Exporting the geo data

You need to save the geo information to a file so that you can save it to your computer. After you stop the "workout", you can retrieve it at any time by starting the application again and selecting "Training diary", and then the date of the data you want to export.

Then choose the correct data set. You can see diverse info such as a summary of the data, and even a track showing the way you walked/drove/etc. Note that no map is displayed at the time, but apparently this is something that Nokia is working on.

Then, simply select Options / Export. You can choose a number of format, including CSV, plain old XML, Google Earth (KML) or GPX. This is the format you want to choose now. The easiest is to save the file on the memory card, it makes it easier to import it on your PC later.

Encoding pictures

Now you're back home, and need to match the pictures with their location. My first move was to start writing a small application to do that, but then I realized that something probably already existed, and I was right. There is an open source application on Google Source available that will do just that: gpicsync (http://code.google.com/p/gpicsync/).

This app allows you to match the timestamps of the recorded locations in the GPS file on one hand, and the timestamps of the pictures you took on the other hand. This is why it was important to synchronize the clocks of the phone and of the camera.

After installing the application, start it. It is a very simple app and was obviously developed by non professional software developers (the UI is quite painful to look at and doesn't resize correctly) but it does the job and is free, which is all we ask from it.

Under Options, you can correct a possible time difference between the GPS and the camera.
Select "Pictures Folder" to set in which folder the pictures you want to geocode are saved.
Select the GPX file you saved before.
If you want to use the pictures in Google Earth later, you can set the corresponding options.
Finally, press "Synchronize".
After the encoding has been done, and if Google Earth is installed on your system, you can even visualize the file, your route and the pictures in this application. This is a nice touch.

Uploading to Flickr

This part is easy too. Simply upload the pics, et voila, you can now see them directly on the Flickr map.