Multipurpose Gadgets

[Sibling DavidH]

Yes, my old Garmin Etrex will claim 5m accuracy on a good day.  Since I really bought it to mark any odd archaeological finds when field-walking round here, it's not quite good enough.  An American archaeologist and I found a piece of Iron-Age pot on a site and I took a waypoint; days later I couldn't find the exact spot again.  However the grid-ref was quite good enough for him to tell his mates back in the US.  Same problem with some Iron-Age furnace-slag I once picked up.  I'm not sure just how much accuracy you need for your work.

[Aggie]

1 - 2 m would be nice, but not realistic without a Trimble.  When we need very accurate data, we bring out surveyors.  Most of the GPS work I do in the field is for site diagrams and trying to find given boreholes or monitoring wells (flush-mounts can be tricky to find again).  Patches of contaminated ground tend to be larger than a pot fragment, but if I could get that kind of accuracy in a handheld, it would definitely be useful.  Conditions can easily change over a 5 m radius.

[Aggie]

*paging DavidH and any other camera techno-wizards again*

Do you have any tips for manipulating EXIF data?  I'm seriously looking at that Sony but would need a way to rip the coordinates for a series of photos into a spreadsheet - the camera uses lat/long coordinates (degrees, minutes, seconds) and I would prefer to get them in NAD84 UTM coordinates.  Leave the conversion up to me...  but how do I get hold of them in the first place, other than manual input?

I'm not yet convinced that this Sony is going to give me the output I want, particularly with respect to the compass.  It's shown on screen as an icon of a compass.   I want degrees from north, or something else I can convert to principal compass points, damnit!

[Sibling DavidH]

There are many available EXIF editors - look at this for example.  Since you only want a few numbers, can't you read them off  and type them in again?  If so, good old Irfan View is all you need.  (I know you said 'other than manual input'  but I'm thinking that unless you've got a large number of photos, any form of software transfer is likely to be even more time-consuming.)

A compass icon is a bit vague, is the compass bearing in the EXIF info, I wonder?

For any siblings who don't know it, Irfan View is an old and well-tried piece of freeware which nobody with a camera should be without. Using it as a photo viewer, just press E to show the full EXIF file. The range of other things it can do is astonishing, e.g. producing Power-Point style presentations or batch resizing, renaming or type conversion.    I also use it for sorting through a batch of photos: F7 moves the displayed photo to another directory, F8 copies it there and DEL deletes it directly, etc etc...

[Sibling DavidH]

Hey, look what I've found!  BR's EXIF extracter (sic) is free and will run through a batch of photos and extract any bits of EXIF you choose, including Lat, Long, Alt and GPS date and time.  It saves them in a .csv format that opens in Excel.  A couple of quick runs show it it's easy to use, but I can't try it on the data you are interested in, as I don't have any.   

You can get it here.

[Aggie]

Manual input, eh?  Not too bad, I suppose, as the lat/long data is probably less than twelve digits (each) and I rarely process more than about 200 photos at a time.

Thank you for the link - I was playing around with a couple of other EXIF programs last night, and while I did find one that will do what I want (EXIFutils) it requires using DOS - something I haven't done in at least two decades (and I aten't even three decades old ).  I'll give EXIF extractor a go, since I'd love to have something I could pass on to others in the office. 

_{btw, I picked on you because you always seem to know what kind of camera I'm using, so I deduced some familiarity with EXIF data - thanks again!} 

Irfan View looks like a valuable program as well, so I will likely give it a try, too.  The batch resizes are problematic at home, since I don't have Office and therefore Microsoft's bit of photo-crapware to do it.

[Sibling DavidH]

Ooh blimey!  200 photos is a lot for manual entry, but then DOS isn't a barrel of laughs either. 

Batch resizing is a doddle with Irfan View.  I use it inter alia to cram hundreds of pictures into my LCD photo frame.

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

DOS?  Crappy?  Bite your tongue... _{let's see...the DOS command for biting one's tongue was.... hmmm... no.. crap!  I can't remember the exact syntax...}

[Aggie]

I didn't say crappy - but one is so used to GUIs these days, it really does feel like stepping back to the 80's.

Bought the beastie, will post some photos soon.  The Sony software that came with it actually looks to be relatively easy-to-use and useful (too much social media interfacing, but not my concern).

[Sibling DavidH]

Great stuff!  Hope it does what you want.  If you post them via Imageshack as before, I'd be interested to see the GPS data in the EXIF.

BTW if you DOWNLOAD Irfan View 4.27, make sure you get the EXIF plug-in.  It's easy to find and add on.  There's a whole user manual, near enough, hidden in HELP>KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS.