Geotag with Google Earth

Picasa 2.5 offers the ability to geotag images using Google Earth.

The way it works is very simple:

• select your images in Picasa
• choose Tools > Geotag > Geotag with Google Earth
• this starts Google Earth, and displays a crosshair and a Geotagging dialog box within Google Earth
• to tag each photo you move the map under the crosshair to the appropriate place, then press the "Geotag" button which tags the highlighted image from the filmstrip of images, and automatically moves you to the next image.

It's a very straightforward workflow, and one that is surprisingly quick.

One problem that I do however have with it is that the filmstrip images are very small - which can make it hard to identify exactly what is pictured.

RoboGeo

An alternative way to do geotagging is to use RoboGeo, which has just come out with version 5.0.  They offer a number of different ways to geotag photos (including matching timestamps with a GPS captured trace).  However, they have obviously also used the Picasa and Google Earth method, and offer it as an almost identical feature.

RoboGeo puts up a very similar dialog within Google Earth, but with one very important difference - a number of features of the dialog can be configured including the size of the thumbnails.  I think this is a feature Picasa would be very wise to adopt.  Perhaps it's unnecessarily complex to ask for the size to be configured in number of pixels, but adding a small slider to the dialog which allows the thumbnail size to be increased would make this much more usable.  I would suggest that the current size is the minimum size offered, but that the upper range should be about 2.5 times the current size.

Update: I should have included a link to Digital Geography's Using Picasa to geotag photographs which provides a nice illustrated step by step guide to the process I ran through above.