Technology for trips and walks

So this area of the blog is active again with a new (and hopefully better) design after an all too long break in activity probably caused by my increased use of Google+ for micro-blogging. The technology I use now includes a Sony NEX-6, a Garmin Oregon 450 as well as the existing kit list which included a Garmin nuvi 255T and Sony Alpha 700 SLR. I’ve also taken out a subscription to Vimeo to host videos and am a subscriber to 500px for my “better” pictures. Some things remain unchanged though – the use of GPS Visualizer (an absolutely brilliant piece of freeware to convert geodata from one format to another) and Everytrail (now taken-over by TripAdvisor – part of the Expedia group) which shows off GPS tracks so well and allows the integration of photos from Picasaweb or Flickr which was so much easier when I used my Panasonic Lumix TZ-10 camera (now in semi-retirement due to the purchase of the NEX-6 – which is amazing) because it is GPS-enabled itself. Otherwise I use my Sony cameras and geocode the pictures manually.

Another piece of wizardry I’ve worked on has been mapping a route on Google Maps, saving it to My Maps and then using the link to the map provided to convert the map to a GPS track. Wow! That’s a really neat way of getting a trip into Everytrail. I’ve done that for the record of our trip to New Zealand.

Postscript: Now that I’ve finished this project – which has in itself been a bit of a refresher and familiarisation of at least three new gadgets (if we don’t count the iPhone 4GS, iPad 2 and the MiFi devices) – I’ve decided to put walks onto Everytrail (with links from this blog) and use this blog for trips with links and embedded videos and slideshows to Picasaweb. [I just have to remember to resize the Everytrail embeds to 100% by 450px and all will be well!]

Everytrail integrates well with Picasa Web Albums (as well as Flickr). It also integrates brilliantly with Google Maps. It now permits direct upload from the Garmin devices (which it had difficulty with before – see here). It also presents great statistics and graphs and allows you to “do the walk” through the photographs. Neat!

I now use Adobe Photoshop Lightroom to do most of the serious editing of pictures; it provides an upload to Picasaweb and many other photo-sharing platforms. I write more about my camera equipment on my photo-blog Moments like these ….