Sharing your tracks and photos on-line

Updated on 30 Nov 2011 by Andy Bryant

Whilst the KMZ file you’ve created of your track-log and photos is great for looking at on your own system, it isn’t great for sending via email - due to the size of the embedded photos.  What you really want to do here is to make use of an online album somewhere to host the photos - and then just include links to the photos from within the kmz file.  This is what I did for the track log from my Tour de Mont Blanc trip.

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Using absolute-altitude vs clamped-to-ground

The problem with my standard method for geotagging photos for a flight in Google Earth is that they’ll be shown at an altitude of 0m, stuck to the ground, rather than in mid-air on your flight-path.  This is pretty easy to fix - because a KML file is an editable text (XML) file, and a KMZ file is just a zip-file containing the KML along with the photos.  You can find out more about KML files from Google or Wikipedia.

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Geotagging photos

Geotagging photos is one of those things you’re going to think is completely geeky until someone shows you a real application for it - then you get the wow factor, and realize it is a great idea.

The concept behind geotagging is to link the GPS coordinates from which you took a photograph to the photo itself, and to store those coordinates as data embedded within the photo.  This is usually done by correlating the time stamp on the photograph with the nearest point recorded in a track-log from a GPS device. Once this correlation is done and the data written to the images; then a suitable application can read the coordinates and display the photo on a map. For example - both flickr and Google picasa will show a clickable map alongside your images.  

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