What isn’t nice, is that Canon, unlike Nikon, offers no cheap and easy solution. With Nikon camera, you can directly mount your GPS unit on top of it and voilà.

Canon is another story. If you want your pictures being geotagged immediately (at the moment they are taken), you must buy the GPS adaptor: WFT-E4. Among other things, this baby will add the geotag directly to your pictures. But that comes with a price, almost $1000 for the WFT-E4! And you still have to buy the GPS unit.

As I had no use of the WFT-E4 except for geotagging and didn’t want to spend $1000, I searched for a low cost solution.

Qstarz

I settled for a GPS unit that does only records GPS track, like the Qstarz. I choose the BT-Q1000ex

It costs (2010) about 150$. I choose this one because it’s the most accurate and if you’re familiar with GPS units, you’ll have noticed that they don’t like slow speed, like people walking.

I hesitated with the Qisteq Phototrackr; but the chipset is less accurate and even if the unit costs less ($69) you have to buy extra softwares to geotag your pictures.

How it works

The process is in two steps. The first is that you have to synchronize your camera clock with your GPS clock. The second is that once you have imported your pictures on your computer, you must synchronize them with the GPS track recorded.

The Qstarz comes with two softwares, the Qtravel and Qsports. The one that interests me is the Qtravel. According to the manual, this software will geotag your pictures automatically.

The reality tells another story.

First, the Qtravel software couldn’t read Canon RAW file. Second, it wasn’t able to track the photos, despite the clocks having been synchronized correctly. Third, it is really slow.

I forgot completely Qtravel to geotag the pictures; instead, I’m using it to export the track in GPS format.

Then I use a marvelous free program called GeoSetter. There you say where you pictures are, and this program can read and write to RAW files, you import your GPS file and voilà!

In GeoSetter you can also add more information, like the name of the town or place, the time zone and so on.

Hopefully this post will save some of you time and money!