Casablanca: GPS Photography Explorer (JPG Version)
© Copyright 2007-2008 Cerium Component Software Inc.

Imagine you and your team of busy photographers unloading their work: the family returning from vacation, archaeologists from a dig, climbers from a Nepal expedition, friends from a biking tour of New Zealand, crews from a regatta off Newfoundland, researchers from a wildlife study near Kinabalu, mappers from a survey of polar ice, freelancers from a warzone assignment, creatives from fashion week or the peak of wedding season, or just roommates from the beachhouse, each with cameraphone....

If you found your way with GPS, the Global Positioning System, by car, boat, plane, bike, or foot, now sort your work that way too.

You didn't take up photography so you could log hours at a computer keyboard, at Digital Asset Management. Can GPS show you a faster route back to the field and the shoot?

Example: This week you shot photos for clients at the equestrian center, the golf course, and the high school stadium:

Back at the computer you corral them in separate folders so the dozens of IMG001s can't destroy one another. Next: "batch renaming, rating, deleting, sorting, adding metadata & keywords, creating master files & derivative files, scheduling back-ups, building a catalog for the images," as described by a photographer who left graphic design because he hated long hours at the computer.

Now the GPS difference:

You want the photos for your equestrian center client first. They are scattered across the subfolders you made for different days and times.

Casablanca GPS Photography Explorer sorts your photos by proximity, by place and time. You open Casablanca, check the Subfolders box, and browse to your main photo directory.

Casablanca finds and lists all GPS-tagged files in all subfolders.

You highlight one photo from the equestrian center so Casablanca can match others in the same vicinity. The golf course and high school were two and three miles away, so for Proximity you enter 1 mile and 3 days, meaning you want all photos taken within one mile of this one, and within three days either way.

You click Center. Casablanca highlights (selects) all photos from the Equestrian center this week, across all your subfolders.

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You also get the distance of each photo from the Center you chose (the example photo you highlighted), as measured in miles and days, so you can make that proximity larger or smaller, to isolate more photos or fewer.

Casablanca calculates distances using a well-known formula for the near-sphere (ellipsoid) surface of earth. Results from Casablanca will match results you get from Google Earth and elsewhere. If your equestrian center and your golf course are 1.8 miles apart, Casablanca should miscalculate by less than the length of a golf club.

You click Organise. Casablanca offers to rename the highlighted (selected) files in various ways and copy or move them to a folder of your choice. You may add to a filename like IMG001 or replace it altogether. You may add a prefix ahead of the name or a suffix after the name or both. Casablanca also offers to append GPS location (latitude and longitude) to the name, or the GPS timestamp, or both. In this example, you add EQ_ in front and GPS location in back and move them all to a new folder you call EQ09Sep2007-2008.

Before making any changes, Casablanca shows you a preview and asks you to confirm. You see Before and After side-by-side in advance, and say Yes or No to the changes.

Casablanca warns if any two files would have the same name in the same folder. In this example, you began with half a dozen IMG001s from the equestrian center in half a dozen folders. Now you have them all in the same folder, with the GPS suffix making each IMG001 a unique name.

Or click List to write names of the selected files to a list along with their GPS location and time. The list is tab-delimited for import into a spreadsheet or any database you use. Or just save the list with the folder or print it.

Good? Let me hear what you think. Send to Casablanca at CeriumSoftware.com. That's an email address disguised from spammers. Replace "at" with the equivalent email symbol.

Download Now: Casablanca GPS Photo Explorer

Lists go to the List Folder you select. On the main menu select File then List Folder.

To start your search from your main photo directory each time, select a Start Folder. On the main menu select File then Start Folder.

The free version of Casablanca can select photo files by vicinity and write them to a list along with their GPS latitude, longitude, and timestamp (List). To move and rename them (Organise), upgrade to Casablanca Pro.

Download Now: Casablanca GPS Photo Explorer
Buy Now: Casablanca Pro GPS Photo Explorer

Registered Casablanca Pro users get updates at no charge for one year. Visit the support page at CeriumSoftware.com to arrange Automatic Software Updates.

All Casablanca users get email support, email announcements (optional of course), and our online documentation (a wiki, for two-way conversation).

Don't have geo-coded JPG photos yourself? You'll find some dazzling examples at EveryTrail.com, GlobalMotion.com, and Panoramio.com.

Just my guess: Soon all JPG photos will be GPS-tagged (geocoded with latitude and longitude). Within months, not years. Camera-phones may lead the way. FCC rules now require location from cell phones for 911 emergency calls. As one GPS surveyor recently (Summer 2007-2008) advised: "Need a photo? Get a phone."

Download Now: Casablanca GPS Photo Explorer
Buy Now: Casablanca Pro GPS Photo Explorer

Casablanca: GPS Photography Explorer (JPG Version)
© Copyright 2008 Cerium Component Software Inc.