Ever since I tried Panoramio and read about the Sony GPS-CS1KA I wanted to geotag my pictures.

I ordered a unit from Mediamarket, but they were not able to deliver within the timeframe they promised, so I went on vacation with the Garmin Etrex only.

When I came home, the GPS-CS1KA was waiting for me in the store.

The unit works quite ok - but my data was on the Etrex. The Sony Software does not work on Vista, nor was it able to process the Garmin data.

After some web research, I found gpsbabel - great software to convert from and to almost any known and unknown gps data format. It runs both on windows and linux - of course I ran it on linux ;-)

I had to write a style to import the data I had exported with gpsgarmin, and then I was able to convert the GPS data into Google Earth KML format.

See my vacation GPS data in google Earth (8.4MB)

Hmm - that is not what I was looking for, but a feature of gpsbabel.

So I had to spend more time with internet research, and finally I found

gpsPhoto Hope this URL helps other people to find it

an open source script to match a GPS tracklog with digital photos - exactly what I was looking for.

The script analyzes time stamps in the images, matches them with the GPS data and then inserts the GPS information into the pictures EXIF header.

Another useful tool I found is Panorado Flyer - a (windows) explorer addon to insert GPS info into pictures. It can get Google Earths current position, so it's useful even when you don't have a GPS unit.

Summary

• bought a Sony GPS-CS1KA - very convenient unit to collect GPS data and transfer it to a computer, but the software does not live up to the promises (does not work on Vista, only reads data from the sony unit)
• did some internet research and found very useful, free tools
• spent a few hours with tons of parameters, converting tracks to routes, routes to waypoints, generating kml files and so on
• thanks to the software I found I can even geotag pictures I took a long time ago