I thought it was time for a new innovative Playak toy...

With the increasing popularity of geo-tracking devices and even photo cameras with on-board GPS, wouldn't it make sense if you could just upload your geo-tagged photos and they would automatically be put on the Kayak World Map? Sure would, so that's what I programmed during the past 2 days.

I thought I'd get things started by automatically scanning the 5000 or so gallery photos on file for GPS tags and put those on the map. Unfortunately, this tought me that this project was a bit TOO innovative, as none of the existing user photos have embedded GPS tags

For those of you who have a little GPS tracker and are looking for a way to GPS-tag their photos befor uploading them to Playak, I found some instructions for Flickr that will work for Playak as well:

1 - download GPS tracks and photos into convenient directory;
2 - adjust time stamps in EXIF data in certain images to account for not having reset the camera's time zone until the second day of the trip (used freeware "mapivi" mapivi.sourceforge.net/mapivi.shtml to do this);
3 - load GPX file and images into geotagging tool (used freeware "copiks" software.copiks.com/photomapper/ for this);
4 - adjust camera time zone setting to account for difference between picture time zone (which was corrected in step 2) and the GPS trackpoints (which are in UTC);
5 - edit copiks' auto-assigned/interpolated coordinates as needed to correct for any obviously incorrect data;
6 - finally, use the "Tag Selected Images" button in copiks to insert the location tags in the EXIF data for the image files.
7- Upload your images on Playak

Hope you'll enjoy this new toy...

Feedback appreciated as always

Jeroen