Matching A GPS File To Your Images In Aperture 3
If your camera doesn’t capture GPS data, you can still get your images into Aperture’s Places section if you have a GPS receiver. You can easily import your GPS data from the receiver into Aperture and the program will match it up to your images.
Click Places
After you import your images, click the Places icon on the toolbar to bring up the Places mode. Connect your GPS to your Mac.
Import Track
From the GPS icon on the bottom of the map viewer, select Import GPS Track.
GPS Track
Depending on your GPS receiver, you’ll either be able to directly connect to the .GPX files, or you’ll need to use a third-party piece of software (like Garmin Training Center, RubiTrack, Ascent or others) to transfer the .GPX files to your Mac. In this case we exported a GPX file from RubiTrack off of a Garmin 705.
Choose Track
Click the Choose Track File button to navigate to the GPX track.
Drag Images Onto Track
Drag whatever images you want to assign to your track anywhere on the track.
Assign Locations
All you have to do is click the Assign Locations button, which automatically matches up the time stamps from the GPS file with the time stamp on the camera, and your images will be automatically placed on the map and the location info will be added to your EXIF data.
Note: If there’s a difference in the time between your camera and your GPS, your images will end up mis-assigned. Be sure to sync your camera and your GPS before you shoot.
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Author: David Schloss
David Schloss is the director of the Mac Create Network and the Aperture Users Network, a professional photographer, writer, editor and photographic educator who specializes adventure sports, travel and lifestyle photography. Schloss is the author of the books Blue Pixel Personal Photo Coach: Digital Photography Tips from the Trenches and Blue Pixel Guide to Travel Photography: Perfect Photos Every Time. Schloss is the former Technical Editor for Photo District News, a position he held for six years.
7 Comments
Stefan
February 14th, 2010
Up until the “choose track file” it works as described. However, Aperture does not ask me to assign the locations. So far, I have found no way to invoke the matching of track file time stamps to the time of my photos manually. Any ideas?
Stefan
Jelle (1 comments.)
February 14th, 2010
Same problem over here. It doesn’t ask me to assign. I’m shooting RAW, maybe that’s the problem?
Stefan
February 14th, 2010
Ah, got it: you have to drag the images onto the track in the map. Elementary, my dear Watson.
Jim
March 2nd, 2010
How un fortunate, I still have yet to get the images to match to the track by time stamp. I drag one image to track and it places it, but no “assign location” pop-up. I tried dragging them all, but they just go to a single pin on the track.
Does anyone have a clue as to why this is? Maybe the track is not time stamped? The track was generated by Garmin Base Camp.
Any ideas out there?
Jimjim (2 comments.)
May 3rd, 2010
I’ve got the same problem. Time between the photo and the gps track is the same, but impossible to auto geotag the other photos.
I’m very interested by a solution.
Jimjim (2 comments.)
May 4th, 2010
I found how resolve the auto assign problem.
I needed to set the time zone of photos to GMT+2, done the same thing with the track. The times must be the same.
And it works.
cruiser (1 comments.)
May 9th, 2010
Thank you … that helped.