HoudahGEO: GeoCode your Photos (5 License Giveaway!)

Posted by Rory Rezzelle on 02/8/08 in Featured, Giveaways, Graphics, Home & Personal, Organization

HoudahGEO Have you ever shown a picture to someone and them ask, “Where is this?” Ever wondered where all of your pictures are on a map or the globe? Wonder no more! Now you can point to where your pictures where taken and the next time you show them off to your friends have the pictures show up on a map exactly where they were taken. How can you do this? It’s all part of the magic of HoudahGEO and geocoding.

*Editor: At the end of this review is a chance to win 1 of 5 HoudahGEO licenses. Read on!

HoudahGEO main screen

HoudahGEO is an application that lets you encode geocoded information (latitude and longitude) into your picture so that mapping apps like Flickr and Google Earth can place them correctly. To do this HoudahGEO lets you upload your pictures, gives you the option of how you wish to encode the information, and finally allows you to export these photos with EXIF/XMP tags and save them to your Mac or to upload them to either Google Earth or Flickr.

See the locations in Google Maps

It’s really a quite simple process and only takes a minute to do each picture (or a batch if they are all in the same location). After choosing your picture(s) from either your library or from a folder you have the choice of how you wish to encode your pictures — you can import data straight from a GPS or a file, pinpoint your picture’s location on a Google Map, or (my favorite) use Google Earth to pinpoint the location.

Once you’ve coded the location you have another choice — where do you want to upload the pictures, or do you want to upload them at all? I opted with uploading them to Flickr as it has a map that everyone can see of all the geocoded pictures on Flickr (If you are going to use Flickr you will have to first give it permission to upload these pictures to your Flickr account. Make sure that “Hide your photos’ EXIF data” is set to “No” and “Import EXIF location data” is set to “Yes”, and then when you choose to upload to Flickr in HoudahGEO press the “Clear Credentials” button and when you press OK it should open Flickr in a browser window and ask you if you want to allow that photo with EXIF data to be uploaded.)

…and Flickr

Until I saw HoudahGEO I didn’t think anything of geocoding photos but now I’m doing it to any pictures that I take, and sometimes I’m just taking pictures so I can geocode them.

Freebie time! Pierre, from Houdah Software, has graciously given us 5 licenses to giveaway so that others can enjoy HoudahGEO just as much as I have so here’s what we are going to do! To be entered into the giveaway, download a trial of HoudahGEO then:

Tell us what you think would make HoudahGEO better.

Tell us how you would use HoudahGEO.

The contest starts now and ends February 15, 2007, at Midnight EST, so leave your comments now and get entered to win this wonderful app.

In case you missed this giveaway, HoudahGEO is created by Pierre Bernard and distributed by Houdah Software as shareware. You can purchase a single user license for US$40.27; if you are a student you can buy the license at a discounted price of US$20.90.

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24 Comment(s)

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Consumer Way said on

February 8th, 2008 at 6:50 am

Wow! I’ve been waiting for an app like this.

I take photos for an Estate Agents and am currently working on a Google Map interface for the website - this would be a fantastic addition and a huge time saver!

molle said on

February 8th, 2008 at 6:57 am

i’d like an arrow in the interface to indicate the direction the photo was taken. would be great for scenic points etc.

great app!

keizo said on

February 8th, 2008 at 8:28 am

This is the first time to use geocode. It’s awesome.
And HoudahGEO is very easy to use.

Fan app.

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-1

David said on

February 8th, 2008 at 9:50 am

I’ve been wanting to geotag my photos of my trip to Europe for a long time. This would be awesome to have. Much better than doing this via Picasa then importing to iPhoto.

Vinod said on

February 8th, 2008 at 10:39 am

This app is great. Would be great to capture our Vacations visually!.

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Bill Shirley said on

February 8th, 2008 at 11:01 am

I have to upload my picture to geocode it, then download it back to my Mac? Why would I do that?

I can already do that in flickr.

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maxim said on

February 8th, 2008 at 11:43 am

i guess i’m not too original, but i would love to use this app to geocode my travel/vacation photos so i can then replay them and fly over the places i’ve seen in google earth.

one neat feature for houdahgeo would be to associate gps coordinates with an actual location name. for example, all coordinates within 20 miles of 33.76, -84.39 would be called “Atlanta, Georgia, USA”, etc…

Mr. Bond said on

February 8th, 2008 at 12:05 pm

As a world-class secret agent, I take a lot of spy photos. Lately, however, Mrs. Moneypenny and the rest of Scotland Yard has been on my case for not properly noting where I take my photos. I’ve tried to explain to them that I rarely have time to do such silly stuff by hand (especially since I am rarely able to do anything without every possible thing that could go wrong actually doing so) but they don’t listen at all. With HoudahGEO, I’d be able to very quickly and very easily tag my photos with location information, making my dealings with British Intelligence a little less… strained.

J Dott said on

February 8th, 2008 at 12:41 pm

I’m an avid cyclist, so I could use HoudahGEO to share my rides with those I care about. As a happy user of HoudahSpot, I’m sure that the program will work better than promised.

Ian said on

February 8th, 2008 at 12:47 pm

I have actually been thinking about doing this for all the photos I’ve taken over the last few months travelling in Europe. The trip was somewhat of a disaster, but organizing and geotagging my photos might be just the ticket to glossing over the problems and remembering the good things.

Hernan J. said on

February 8th, 2008 at 1:25 pm

Really nice app! Perfect for my fishing hobby!

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Andrey K said on

February 8th, 2008 at 1:37 pm

My extended family lives on 3 continents in North America, Europe and Asia. We travel often and like to share photos. If I can pinpoint where the picture was taken it would be very cool. And the grandparents would love to see places we took our baby girl.

And later this year we re going on a cruise in the Mediterranean. 10 cities in 14 days.. so many different locations. I thing HoudahGEO would be a nice application for me to have

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Jim said on

February 9th, 2008 at 3:58 pm

In iphoto I’ve been entering city names and states of where I take pics. It would be nice to have a feature that parses those tags and comes up with general coordinates for them. From within HoudahGEO maybe one could then get a more exact placement with the map feature or something.

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Pierre Bernard said on

February 9th, 2008 at 4:45 pm

@Bill Shirley
You don’t need to upload your pictures anywhere. HoudahGeo can do much more than Flickr geocoding: automatic GPS geocoding, manual Google Earth geocoding, …, Google Earth export, ..

@maxim
You may configure Google Earth to play photos as a slideshow: flying from location to location

@maxim
HoudahGeo does support “reverse geocoding”. Look in the Geocode menu.

Best,
Pierre Bernard
Houdah Software s.à r.l.

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Colby G said on

February 9th, 2008 at 9:49 pm

The new maps app for the iphone has the ability to tell you where you are without using a gps - simply using Wifi signals. With memory cards now being able to wirelessly transfer photos to a storage device, it would be awesome if the photos could automatically tag themselves….

Kkozoriz said on

February 10th, 2008 at 12:07 am

My wife and I are currently tracing our family trees. We’re spending a lot of time in cemeteries

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Chris Holden said on

February 10th, 2008 at 10:43 am

This just may fit the bill. Now that I’m organizing my large library of photos, I can name every photo’s location at home, but I’ve been waiting until I have the photos online to do anything more meaningful with that data. It’s useful in urban areas as well as remote locations. This could be the missing piece of my workflow.

Bobby said on

February 10th, 2008 at 2:55 pm

I’d use it to geotag pictures during my upcoming vacation to the Southwest.

Britonius said on

February 11th, 2008 at 12:23 am

I could use it for real estate to locate where the house or property resides physically. I could also use it for my vacation photos so it will tie a location to the photo taken.

Henry said on

February 11th, 2008 at 12:29 pm

I would like to use this app to geotag my travel photos and to share it with others, especially with members of VirtualTourist.com.

It would be helpful if someone could do a video demo of this app or showcase examples of geotag photos on Google Earth. I checked the forum under HoudahGeo Sharing but there wasn’t any posting.

For those who are already using this app, please share your photos at HoudahGeo Share. Thanks!

Pierre Bernard said on

February 11th, 2008 at 1:54 pm

@Henry
Done.

Please watch the ScreenCastsOnlineweb site for an upcoming screencast.

Pierre Bernard
Houdah Software s.à r.l.

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Andy said on

February 12th, 2008 at 6:24 pm

I would use it to integrate my gps logged tracks with my trip photos! Hopefully put it all up on my website!

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Paul said on

February 13th, 2008 at 1:39 pm

I’d like to map out my trips to the Fryeburg, ME and Conway, NH area with photos linked to areas not appearing on many maps I’ve searched. This also includes the Mount Washington area of NH.

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gps spy said on

February 15th, 2008 at 5:46 am

gps spy…

Basically, what blue tooth gps does is take the gps device and sends a signal to your blue tooth wireless laptop or your PDA….

Philip Black said on

February 18th, 2008 at 6:37 am

Nearhere travel allows you to geo code photos for free http://www.nearheretravel.com/