Picture a Place

I've been using Adobe Lightroom 4 for about a year now, but there's so much about it that I've yet to learn.  Something new that I've just begun to investigate is the Map module, which appears as one of the tabs at the top.  An Adobe training video,  Mapping your Photos in Lightroom 4, explained a number of things that I didn't know.  For example, you can select a number of vacation photos and manually link them to a Google Earth map just by putting in the location in the search string and then dragging the pictures onto the map.

There's also a plug-in app for Lightroom that's called GeoEncode.  This plug-in takes the tracking information generated by the MotionX-GPS iPhone app and synchronizes it with the time stamps on a group of pictures that I took on a bike ride, for example.  Allowing for a margin of error, it will take the pictures and lay them out in sequence over the track that I recorded.  I've just done it for a couple of tracks, but the results are impressive.

It's kind of ironic that the pictures I take with my relatively inexpensive iPhone come with geotracking already attached, whereas my Canon T2i does not have built-in tracking.  As far as I know, the Canon EOS 6D is the only model that currently features geotracking.

Perhaps all of this sounds like an Application Without a Purpose ^(tm), but I've found that it's really neat to be able to view pictures in relation to the geographic coordinate in which they were taken.  It lends additional meaning to photo archives.