March 23, 2007
GPS metadata in Lightroom and Google Maps
Here is a hidden feature that has been around in Lightroom since Beta 2, but is one that I only found out about it recently thanks to a recent story on John Nack’s Adobe blog. Basically, if you have GPS metadata embedded in an image file, Lightroom will let you link directly to Google Maps and locate exactly where that photograph had been taken.
But in order to pull off this trick you will need to find a way to embed GPS metadata in your image capture files. This is not as difficult as you might imagine, since there are now several GPS devices capable of capturing the GPS coordinates at the time of capture and then synchronize the GPS data with your capture images via post-processing software. For example, according to John Nack’s blog, Jobo AG has announced photoGPS, a $149 device that sits in the hot shoe (i.e. the mounting point for a flash) of a digital SLR. Post-processing software synchronizes data captured by the device with the corresponding images.