Product Reviews

While Geophoto is designed primarily as a kind of globe-based album for photos that contain geographical data, HoudahGeo's main role is to give you an easy way to embed this data into photos.

While it's true that Geophoto can tag photos, it's currently very imprecise. HoudahGeo allows you to place photographs with a much greater degree of accuracy, and it can do so in two ways.

As with Geophoto, you can tag photos manually. The difference here is that HoudahGeo leverages the power of Google Maps, so you can place photos by eye to within a few feet. The drop-down sheet that allows you to place the markers unfortunately doesn't give you a search option - which would be a really handy way of quickly navigating to your target - but with a scroll-wheel mouse it only takes a few seconds to zoom and pan into the correct area.

Where things get really smart, however, is when the system uses GPS data from a range of devices to add location information automatically. You just wander around taking photos with your GPS device on, and HoudahGeo will use this data to location-stamp your images when you get back to your Mac. It does this by comparing the information embedded into your photos' Exif data with that

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from the GPS device, matching up the time you took certain shots with the GPS data of where you were at that time. It's a neat system, and one which only requires you to have the clock set correctly on your camera; some other systems require dongles to be added to the camera's hot-shoes or the like.

Though HoudahGeo has the ability to capture GPS data directly from devices, it took exception to the one we were using in testing - a Garmin eTrex Vista C. But when we used LoadMyTracks (cluetrust.com/LoadMyTracks.html) to download the GPX data, HoudahGeo tied it to our photos flawlessly. Expect smoother direct import in the future.

Once HoudahGeo has associated a location with each photo - which can be pulled in manually or by browsing iPhoto albums, though the help files caution that results are best when images are geotagged before being added to iPhoto - it can write this data to their metadata headers, and optionally spit out a file for use with Google Earth. This last contains thumbnail versions of the photos, the location data and even the path you took, and can be shared across platforms. Once the location data is hard-coded into the photos, these too can be shared, and the data exploited.

The workflow is logical, and although the application could use a bit more polish to make it more Mac-like, its incongruous interface does nothing to hinder use.

We encountered no problems with Jpegs; mileage may vary with Raw files, so try out the demo if you're wary.

Ultimately, then, there's really only one fly in the ointment: an application called GPSPhotoLinker (oregonstate.edu/~earlyj/gpsphotolinker) does much the same thing as far as automatic geotagging is concerned, and it's free. Then again, so is HoudahGeo's demo, so it's worth trying both before making a decision.