Moblogging and Geotagging with a UMPC. Overview with Video.

As you might have read on Monday, I took the bike, a UMPC, a GPS tracker and my camera out with me to see how I could best provide a good Google Maps photo overview of my track and the photos I took along the way. What I ended up with was more than satisfying and even better, the process used to get there was nice and simple. In fact for me, this is such a significant process that I decided to detail it as much as I could. There are already demos and web pages about it but I don’t think any of them used a ultra mobile PC while on the road…

Firstly, here’s the end result of my tour. Click on the image below to go through to a map of the area showing a track and some flag pointers. Click on each pointer to see the photo at the point that I took it. If you’ve never used Google Maps before you’ll be amazed at how much detail you can zoom down too. Try it in satellite image mode. Its amazing.

Click to see the map.

Now a quick overview of the equipment and method.

Equipment.

• Samsung Q1P UMPC. This was used to pull together all the image and track info to create the map data. It was also used to make the post I did while drinking a fresh beer! I even produced the video below on it.
• Garmin Etrex GPS. A simple, cheap and widely available GPS unit that is rugged, has a bike mount and runs on normal AA batteries.
• Canon S2 IS camera. Any digital camera will do but the S2 IS did a good job with the video too.
• 3G Mobile phone with Internet data plan (for posting map and images to website)
• USB cable for camera
• Garmin Serial cable and Digitus Serial-USB1.1 adaptor for GPS.
• RoboGeo Software (explanation below)
• Microsoft WWMX GPS track downloader software. (free)
• Microsoft Image resizer from the XP PowerToys set. (free)
• Microsoft Windows LiveWriter blogging software set up for your blog or content management system. (free)

Method.

Ensure your camera is set to the correct date and time. This whole process rely’s on a good synchronization between GPS and image timestamps. Mount the GPS on the bike, clear the GPS track, make sure its got a satellite lock. Load the camera up with fresh batteries and memory. Put it with the UMPC, Cables and a few beer tokens in your backpack and off you go. Cycle. Take pictures. Have fun. Stop for a break.

When you stop for a break, you need about 5 minutes to create the Google map and post a blog like this:

1. Download the images you took to a folder on your ultra mobile PC using the USB connectivity. I use the built in Windows Camera and Scanner Wizard and I have set it up to auto-download the images in to a folder named with today’s date. It then deletes the images from the camera.
2. Resize the images to a sensible 1024×768. Keep the originals for when you get home!
3. Connect the GPS module to your ultra mobile PC via the USB-Serial converter and use the WWMX GPS track Downloader to pull in the track from the Etrex.
4. Use the RoboGeo software to 1) Load in the resized images. 2) Load in the track. The RoboGeo software will try to use the timestamp of the photo to find the co-ordinates from the track at that time. If RoboGeo can’t find the details, it will tell you.
5. Write the co-ordinates to the EXIM header of your photo. This ensures that the location data is always with the photo. You might want to do this to the original photos too.
6. The final step is to create the Google Map with the overlayed track and photos.

The Google Map creation window allows you to put your Google Map API Key in (get one here through a simple sign-up process.) and to tailor the map page and image titles and descriptions. You can either create a new map or add to an existing one. When you hit ‘Create Google Map’ everything will be processed and placed into a new folder of your choosing. If you are connected to the Internet at this time, you can just click on map.htm and you’ll see the track and then the Google Maps data being downloaded. You should click on the pointers to check your images.

1. If everything looks OK, upload the whole directory to your website via your favorite FTP or upload method.
2. Open up LiveWriter and make a nice blog entry. Include a leader photo and a snapshot (ALT-PRINTSCREEN) of the map page in your web browser. Link the map page to map.htm in the uploaded map data folder.
3. Post using Internet connectivity via 3G phone.
4. RoboGeo can also handle posting the photos with the correct tags to Flickr. Flickr has built-in ability to extract EXIM data and show images on maps.
5. Fire up your IM software and annoy everyone by sending the URL and telling them that you’re having a great time!

When you get home, make sure you create a complete map of all parts of your journey. Upload higher res images if you like. Ensure originals are tagged with geo coordinates for future reference.

Here’s a video of the whole event. Its long but the video also includes on-bike video action and a little tour of Bonn! For the info about ultra mobile PC Moblogging and Geotagging just watch the first and last sections of the video. There’s also a live section in the middle of the video where I try and demonstrate the process. You can’t really see much detail due to sunny lighting though.

The full video is available via Stage6 which is a DivX hosting site. I use DivX because its generally better suited to playback on PCs with lower processing power and it supports much higher quality videos than YouTube. You may require a plugin to play it but you get the advantage of the higher resolution which helps with the on-screen demo at the end of the video. I will, however, convert it to YouTube format very soon because the DivX version requires quite a high bandwidth. (Download is recommended if you’re having trouble streaming.)

Double-click for full-size version.

You Tube versions now available (split into three parts.)

Click through for larger versions.