Ovolab Geophoto

A newer version of Ovolab Geophoto is available.

• 3.0 stars

  "Promising, but needs to get quirks fixed"

  May 8, 2008  |   By Tom Dibble

  Summary

  This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.
  First of all, if you have a Canon camera which produces CRW files, this software will NOT geocode your raw images. It's apparently a fault of the CRW format, although a simple read of their FAQ on supported file types would lead you to believe it was able to geocode the format. This, combined with their unconscionably crippled 'demo' version, which doesn't allow you to try the single most important aspect of the application (does it geotag your files) means you're likely going to need to ask for your money back or adop your workflow significantly.

  That aside, I keep seeing Google Earth resolution complaints here. I'm not sure if anyone has noticed, but in the Preferences pane there is an "Imagery" tab, and clicking the "Download" button will "upgrade" your satelite resolutions by exactly one step. Its a painful interface, as you need to click the button, wait an hour for the next res to finish downloading, then click the button again. But, it seems to resolve the resolution complaints. Obviously, though, having all of Google Earth satellite images on local disk is a huge waste of disk space. It'd be really nice if there was a better interface to this, and which would allow you to "downgrade" to conserve space.

  Still on the topic of possibly incorrect statements in other reviews: you can indeed directly key in the latitude/longitude of a particular image, by using the Item | Set Location ... menu tem (also accessible from the Inspector's "gear menu") then clicking the second tab of the dialog. That gives four ways to geocode an image so far as I can see:

  1. Match to GPS log files
  2. Drag/drop in Google Earth interface
  3. Enter city/country (photo gets placed in geographic center of the city ... it'd be nice if there was an accuracy measure in the EXIF tags)
  4. Enter lat/long directly

  My main gripe is in the match-logs dialog box. Every time it comes up there is a drop-down which contains every major city around the world linked to its time zone to identify the time zone of the camera. This defaults to a GMT location, so I suppose if you were along that meridian you'd be all set. For me, though, getting to Americas/Los Angeles is a painful click, drag, watch scroll, drag back from overscrolling, search, click process. A simple memory of which time zone you'd selected last time would be really useful here!

  Some streamlining here would be useful. There are far too many steps required to just match up a bunch of images to a log file. Integration with Aperture more directly would be nice (I have to open up the project location and do a spotlight search for all .CRW files underneath, then drag those in to GeoPhoto; being able to automatically open the master files for selected images in Aperture would be really nice).

  Stability? I don't think I've used it enough to say for certain, although the demo crashed on me repeatedly when trying to update from the web (I'm guessing the issue had to do with the no-saving cripple; registered then reran the update process and all went well).

  Finally, the OvoLab web site is atrocious. It says for support we should go to their forums ... anyone see such a link anywhere? No, me either. If it's there, I doubt anyone else has shown up. If you want to foster community, you need to make the forums highly visible!!!

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