Laptop GPS World

TORRANCE, CA – January 3, 2008 — Building on the company’s tradition of innovation in the Global Positioning System (GPS) market, Pharos Science & Applications, Inc., a leading provider of location-based information and services, today introduced Pharos Trips & Pics, a geo-logger that enables consumers to record trip and photo locations and display them on a map quickly and easily. Trips & Pics works with any digital camera and provides an entirely new way for consumers to organize and share trip routes and photographs, track and improve athletic training times or generate precise trip statistics for personal or professional use. Trips & Pics will be available for $89.95 at major retail outlets in January.

“Over the years, Pharos has enabled consumers to add GPS capability to laptops, Pocket PCs and Smartphones, driving a wide variety of location-specific scenarios on those devices,” said James Oyang, Ph.D. President of Pharos Science & Applications. “We’re pleased to extend this expertise to the digital camera market and make precise location information more broadly available.”

By combining Pharos’ award winning iGPS-500 receiver with a sub-pocket-sized battery unit and easy to use geo-logging software, Trips & Pics offers a complete solution for GPS-enabled photo and trip tracking. To use Trips & Pics, a user simply carries the GPS receiver and battery unit along on a trip. At the end of the journey, the user removes the iGPS-500 from its sled, connects it to the personal computer via the supplied Universal Serial Bus (USB) cable, and follows download instructions. Step-by-step instructions allow the user to easily export digital photo or location files and display them on the map of choice, such as Microsoft Streets & Trips, Google Earth, Google Maps or Pharos’ own maps. Trips & Pics supports Geographic encoded Really Simple Syndication (GeoRSS) to allow blog sites to push location data feeds.

Trips & Pics software allows users to track time, location, heading and speed, and pinpoints locations on the map. Users can select variable logging intervals from one second up to five minutes. Further, the GPS receiver is controlled in the field with an on-off switch, meaning it logs only while activated, saving power and extending field life to more than 45 days. Trips & Pics portability and long battery life are of particular benefit to professionals such as real estate agents, geologists and news photographers. In the near future, Pharos will provide an upgrade option for customers who already own Microsoft Streets and Trips with GPS Locator or Pharos Bluetooth GPS and wish to add Trips & Pics functionality.

Technical Specifications:

GPS Receiver: SiRFStarIII, 20-channel GPS receiver
Antenna: Built-in internal antenna
Battery: 1100mAh Li-Ion rechargeable/replaceable
Operation time: Approximately 24 hours
Weight: 2.12 ounces
Dimensions: 2.81” x 1.85” x 0.89”

That's an excellent solution for someone who doesn't already have, and use, a GPS for navigation. There are other solutions for those of us who already have a GPS that we use for navigation.

First of all, we need to do a couple of things. One is to make sure we save our track files of our travels. They contain all the necessary information to correlate our location with the date/time stamps in our digital photos. Second, we need to make sure we keep the date/time settings in our digital cameras reasonably accurate.

If we have the track files available, it's simple to just drop a basic text file containing the location information into the picture folders, or name the picture folder something meaningful regarding the location.

If we want to be able to link the pictures to maps there are utilities available that allow you to geocode your pictures if you already have the necessary location information. That's all in the track files. If you don't have the track files but do recall where you shot the pictures you can just fire up your S&T or Google Earth and get the necessary coordinates from there.

A few months after the fact I can never remember where I shot a lot of my scenery pictures so I plan to start keeping my track files when I travel. I have some but I've never made it a habit to keep them. I will now. I think I'll track down a free or cheap geocoding application and try it out ... a good way to spend some time on these cold winter nights.

Do you suppose Pharos would sell a software-only version for those of us who already have the ability to capture track files?

...ken...

Ken, that's a good question. Hopefully we will find the answer soon. I just added a picture of Pharos Trips & Pics box to the first post above .

__________________
Marvin Hlavac

Laptop GPS software reviews | Stores offering discounts to our members: Semsons & Co. Inc. and Deluo Electronics

Okay, I've done a little poking around and here's what I've found so far.

[Marvin, if you think this should be elsewhere or a new thread, please feel free to move it.]

Panorado Flyer is a nifty application that installs as a Windows Explorer shell extension. That just means when you right-click in Windows Explorer on an image file (jpg, etc) you will see Panorado Flyer as one of the things you can do.

When you select Panorado Flyer in the context (right-click) menu, you can select to get the location from Google Earth or you can select to edit the location information manually.

If you want to use Google Earth to get the location, you have to have Google Earth running first. You find the desired location in Google Earth and make sure it's at the centre of the map window. Then you right-click on the image file, select Panorado Flyer, select Get Location From Google Earth. A dialog window will pop up with the name of the image file and the coordinates from Google Earth already filled in. If that's what you want, you just save it.

If you choose Edit Location Manually, you will see the same dialog box only this time you need to enter the coordinates yourself.

Once you have an image with the location coordinates attached to it you can right-click it, select Panorado Flyer and you will see a new selection in the context menu to Show Location in Google Earth. If you click that selection, Google Earth will be launched (if it's not already running) and you will fly to the location of the picture. There will be an icon at that location on the map that allows you to click and see a dialog with a thumbnail of the picture. Clicking on the thumbnail will display the full image.

That's fine, as far as it goes, but it doesn't speak to the real power of this. It requires an understanding of how this all works to get to the real power.

When you click to "Show Location in Google Earth", Panorado Flyer creates a temporary file with a .KML extension and launches Google Earth with a pointer to the temporary KML file.

When Google Earth opens that KML file it puts the image location information in a folder called "Temporary Places". You can move that image from the temporary folder to a permanent folder. So, you can have, say, an "IMAGES" or "My Pictures" folder in your Google Earth with a list of all the images that have location coordinates in them. Now when you want to look at, or show, your pictures related to their location you can just open Google Earth and select from the folder you put them in.

This does nothing to your actual image files on the computer. The information in Google Earth simply contains pointers to the image files on your computer.

One last small point that I ran into. The first time I tried to display an image in Google Earth that I had added a location to, nothing happened. It turned out that for some reason the .KML file extension had not been associated with any program. It needs to be associated with "C:\Program Files\Google\Google Earth\googleearth.exe", or wherever yours is located.

Play and have fun. Oh yeah, did I mention that Panorado Flyer is totally free?

...ken...

Almost exactly 4 months after this thread was started, I finally came across a review by someone who actually looked at Pharos Trips & Pics. When the product was originally announced, in January 2008, I sent a quick e-mail to Pharos to request a review copy, but a reply never arrived, and then it slipped from my mind - till today: Review of Pharos Trips & Pics by PC Magazine

__________________
Marvin Hlavac

Laptop GPS software reviews | Stores offering discounts to our members: Semsons & Co. Inc. and Deluo Electronics

If you look in a track file you will see that that's exactly what the Pharos dongle is creating .. just a standard track file. So based on the PC Mag review it sounds like the ideal package for those of us who can create track files with our existing GPSs would be the Pharos software but with the added features of being able to use track files created externally and updating the EXIF info in the image files.

...ken...