So you got a new piece of gear for christmas huh? Whether it’s a new camera body or simply a lens cloth.

Go and use it I’ll wait…

…Right so you’ve got a camera full (or at least a few shots) now what? Well here’s what I do, I’m not saying its the only way – nor the best – but I’m writing this in the hope that not only I help you – but you can also help me!

Personally, I use Lightroom 2 to process my photographs, and in the coming week up to New Years’ Day, I’ll show you a photo’s route from the camera through to the web.

I believe in keeping the metadata as far upstream as possible, so I geotag the RAW before Import. I use iTrail for the iPhone to do the hard work of Geotagging. It’s as simple as creating a new Trail and leaving it in your pocket.

A route I made for the Greenwich Photowalk

The best bit is that the route can be exported as GPX to Google Documents (as below)

The Export Dialog to get the data up to Google Docs

Its not very useful having the GPX in Google Docs forever though – so I find the GPX in Google Docs and export it as text – like below…

Saving the Google Doc to the desktop

So then what? I copy the card contents over to a folder on the iMac (note I haven’t open Lightroom yet, nor have I removed the files from the card – that happens waaay down the line!)

I then use a program called GPSPhotoLinker to put the two together. I reli on doing time weighted averages as I don’t need it down to the millimetre.

GPS Photo Linker - Putting it all together

On the left you grab the GPX data, on the right you select the photos. To make it simple I choose the batch tab and pick up the time weighted average. Click go et Voila. Finally ready to get them into Lightroom!

Which is what will be posted tomorrow here- I can’t give you every present in one day! :)