The DeLorme Weblog

I got a chance to sneak away from the office for a long weekend last Friday. My college friend put together a fly fishing trip for steelhead on the Salmon River in Pulaski, New York. I took the Earthmate PN-20 and a SeaLife ECOshot camera along with me.

Since the GPS and the camera are both ruggedized I wasn’t worried about rain or dropping them or the potential swim. I carried the GPS in my left fly vest pocket and the camera in my right pocket. I turned the GPS on at the start of each day and then left it in my pocket to record my track. I used the SeaLife camera to take pictures of our fishing adventures… lots of casting, only a couple of fish, but still well worth it since the Salmon River is such a beautiful stretch of water. The fish were there — I had three great strikes with fish coming right out of the water… It’s that kind of excitement that keeps me coming back each year.

Once I got home, tagging the photos was as easy as copying the pictures from the ECOshot to my computer, viewing the PN-20 track in Topo USA, and running the GeoTagger tool. GeoTagger is a tool that compares the time/date stamp on the digital picture with the time/date stamps on the GPS readings in the track log. The tool creates your choice of a waypoint, a hyperlink, or an image note on the map so that you can see exactly where each photo was taken. It’s really amazing because the camera becomes your tool for creating waypoints. I didn’t have to take the GPS out each time we caught fish… the camera marked the time the fish was caught and GeoTagger matched the photo to the GPS track.

Helpful Tip: Synchronize the time/date on your GPS and on your camera before you start taking pictures!

We built the GeoTagger utility with the ability to create an offset in case the time/date of your camera did not exactly match the time/date of your GPS. What I’ve found is that it’s much easier to just take a few minutes before your trip to synchronize the time/date on both devices. View the Time/Date info field on the GPS and on the camera… set the camera a minute ahead of the GPS but wait to save the change until the GPS time has caught up with your pending camera time change.

Having the two devices synchronized removes the need to specify a time offset in GeoTagger and makes tagging very easy. Here’s a screen capture showing Topo USA with aerial imagery on the left, Topo USA data on the right, and two nice photos from our steelhead fly fishing trip on the Salmon River. I’ve uploaded the rest of the photos to our Team DeLorme Flickr site if you’re interested.