Geotag This!

I am officially not a fan of the current state of geotagging tools/websites. It would be hard to suck all of the fun out of the phenomenal hike/swim that is the White Oak Canyon/Cedar Run hike but Flickr and EveryTrail nearly accomplished it. It seems like a fun little idea to give you a map as the backdrop to the slideshow (and I basically went out and purchased a GPS in order to do just that) but the tools just aren't ready yet. Here is a short list of the problems I have now had with this process:

• Picasa can't read the geotags in my photos edited by WWMX Location Stamper (Solution: Batch edit the version number with an Exif editor or switch editors)
• Picasa photo maps can't be embedded in a blog (Solution: Use EveryTrail.com which creates the embedded code)
• EveryTrail simply fails to read half of the photos uploaded from my PC and can't link to my Picasa photos (Solution: Use Flickr for my photos since EveryTrail can link to them)
• Flickr limits me to 100MB/Month... and the photos from a single hike are 125MB (Solution: Change the default preferences in Flickr Uploadr to resize your photos to 1600—or smaller—and realize that it will still tell you that you are about to upload 125MB)
• Flickr uploads photos and throws away the geotag data (Solution: Change the default setting in your Flickr account profile that disables importing of location data!)
  
• Flickr Uploadr puts photos in reverse chronological order and only lets you reorder one at a time... and the photos don't go into the set specified (Solution: Use the Organizr in the web interface to place the photos in sets and choose Arrange to reverse their current order)
• When Everytrail imports from Flickr... it only succeeds in importing half of the photos! (Solution: Import the other half manually from the computer a couple photos at a time)
• Once they are all uploaded and you are about to manually readd the captions to the ones that didn't import from Flickr... realize that the photos are out of order and EveryTrail doesn't give you a mechanism to reorder them (Solution: Get pissed, write a seething blog entry about your frustration, post the slideshow in its traditional mapless form, get some sleep and try to remember how much fun the hike was instead of how frustrating embedding a geotagged slideshow into a blog currently is)

Oh yeah. Did I mention we had a fun hike returning to White Oak Canyon and Cedar Run yesterday? Enjoy the slideshow :-)



Note to Jon:

• Stop at the Sheetz on the right-hand side of 211 in Warrenton instead of the Wawa on 29 in Gainesville (gas was 6 cents cheaper than Wawas morning price... which went up an additional 8 cents while we were out hiking!)
• Plastic bags full of water apparently keep houseflies away. We saw several bags hung around Burgers 'n' Things and admittedly didn't see a lot of flies hanging around
• Order the Dreamsicle Milkshake for the post-hike treat
• Hike stats:
  Length: 8.1 miles
  Duration: 5 hours, 56 minutes, 9 seconds
  Average Speed: 1.4 mph
  Vertical up: 4193.4 ft
  Vertical down: 4218.6 ft