Geocoding: Using GPS Data in Your Lightroom Workflow

I’m very excited to get my copy of Photoshop User magazine with my feature article on using GPS with Lightroom!

It is in the June 2009 issue. If you are a NAPP member it should be hitting your mailbox now, but you can also pick up a copy on most newstands that carry photography magazines.

In the article I referenced a couple of ways I include GPS data during output. One of the ways is in my blog posts that have the GPS tag. I do this using a Lightroom export plugin called LR2/Blog. Using LR2/Blog I can export directly to a wordpress template for my blog. In this template I can pull metadata from my photos and insert that right into the blog post itself.

The other way I use GPS data in my output is with a Lightroom web gallery template. Here is an example gallery you can take for a spin. The gallery being used in that example is the default HTML gallery that comes with Lightroom … with a few minor modifications. Lightroom can display the GPS coordinates just fine out of the box. You just need to create a custom text template that pulls the GPS data. This is what I did to display the data above each photo in the close up view page. That is the easy part.

The hard(er) part is that I went under the hood in the gallery code to create the “Map This” link you see below each photo. In addition to creating the link I also had to format the GPS coordinate data a little so that Google Maps could read it correctly and display the correct location when you click the link. This isn’t brain surgery, but it probably deserves a tutorial of its own to show you how I did it (so stay tuned!).

I hope you find the article helpful and please let me know if you have any questions or links to other resources!