Aperture 3 Feature for Backpackers and Photography
Here is a feature in Apple’s Aperture 3 that I ALWAYS wished I had…visual map reference of all my outdoor and backpacking adventures tied to all my images and GPS tracks for cataloging my adventures. I take Landscapes as part of my love for backpacking in the wild. Not only that, but as I journey around the backcountry I come across places I really want to remember AND find again. Aperture 3 makes that possible.
Let’s say I hiked a section of the PCT and at some point I went off trail for a few days to a place I chose on a map. Let’s say I found a beautiful, crystal clear lake and a very secluded private camp. I took LOTS of pictures all over the area for my journal, as well as a few beautiful Landscapes for my portfolio. My camera does NOT have GPS capabilities so what can I do?
Once the images are loaded into aperture, I take out my GPS unit I was using to track my adventure and hook it to the Mac. I then import the “Track” into Places. If you know anything about GPS at all, you know it is all based on time (I could explain but it would take a lot more time than I have). So now that your track is in Places, You can drag your pictures that you took, while on that track, to the track in Places. Now for the “magic” part… because GPS is time based and so is your track, all your pictures are added to the correct place on the track. How? The pictures are all time stamped, are they not? The track is time generated and all the math is done by Aperture.
Very cool!
I could use this for car camping too. We hate going to campgrounds or paying to camp, so we head out on logging roads and 4×4 to places way out in the woods. All the pictures of camp are now referenced so that we can find them AND remember what the camp was like (big, small, water, sites are all cataloged). Even if we are camping somewhere else and come across a great camp site, we now put it in the “Campsites” project for future reference.
Here is Apples videos on the feature:
Importing GPS Locations from a GPS Tracker or iPhone
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UPDATE 02-03-2010:
So I import my GPS track from the Garmin, it places it, but I get no “assign photos” dialog after dragging the first one. I then drag the rest and they all go to one point. I go back and look at the track log and find every time stamp is set to 5pm. There is no way for the photos to align, because none of them were taken at exactly 5pm.
After working this over a few times, I have found that any time I clear a GPS track in my Garmin GPSmap 60 (after saving internally of course), Garmin has made it so that all timestamp information is stripped. How dumb is that. This means that the 12 tracks I currently have saved in my GPS unit have NO time stamps and this feature will not work.
The only way to get timestamp information is from the “Active” track. So, let’s say I turned my unit on at the trailhead, and tracked all the way to the camp 4 hours away. Let’s also say that I want to track, for safety reasons, my bushwacking adventure for the day to a small lake. You could go on and on with this for as long as your out there.
Unfortunately, Garmin has made the saving of individual tracks useless in this case. You have to keep all your travels as one LONG “Active” track. Once you get home and download the track, using your program of choice, you can split the tracks usually within the program.
