# Keywording rivers, mountains, and other geographical features



## allen-c (Mar 19, 2013)

I wonder how best to do this, what other people do... I currently have divided the world up conveniently into continents, and countries, and some countries into counties, départements, etc., etc. However rivers often flow between counties, sometimes between countries, and, some, no doubt, start in one continent and end up in another.

Is the best practice, I wonder, to have a separate top-line keyword tag River, and put all rivers in there, or should I stick to my approximate setup where I've stashed rivers (and mountains) inside each country and just avoid taking photos of any of those that cross inconvenient borders? What do all you Americans do with the Mississippi? And the Danube, the Nile, the Amazon? Do you have a Mississippi for each state and a Nile for every country they flow through?

And yes, I know, there are other things more important to think about!


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## erro (Mar 19, 2013)

As I see it, continents, countries, cities and so on are geographic locations. A photo can only be taken in one location.

A river is not a location, but rather a .... "land formation", much like a mountain, or a desert or.... So I would probably create a top level keyword for "land formations" or whatever and put keywords under that. And put the continents under a top level keyword called "location".

So a photo taken on the Mississippi would get a location keyword depending on what state and county you were in at that location, and also a "formation" keyword stating that it is the Mississipi river.

- location
- - North america
- - - USA
- - - - Lousiana
- - - - - xxx county

- land formation
- - river
- - - Mississippi


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## Jimmsp (Mar 19, 2013)

allen-c said:


> I wonder how best to do this, what other people do... ..What do all you Americans do with the Mississippi? And the Danube, the Nile, the Amazon? Do you have a Mississippi for each state and a Nile for every country they flow through?
> 
> And yes, I know, there are other things more important to think about!



I use, or try to use efficiently, a set of hierarchical key words to try to overcome this. One set, under Subject>Nature  would include Rivers, which would then include the Mississippi.
Another set falls under Place. This is intended to identify the place where I took the photo.

So I might end up with 2 photos of the Mississippi. Each would have the keyword set Subject>Nature>River>Mississippi
One would also have Place>USA>Minnesota>Minneapolis , and the other Place>USA>Missouri>St. Louis.

And yes, it is worth some worry.  

Jim


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## clee01l (Mar 19, 2013)

States, Countries, Counties etc are locations. Rivers, mountain ranges, lakes are not locations but are landforms.  While land forms have a location, it is spatial and not necessarily local. 

Answering this question may help you understand.  Is the Missouri River located in Kansas City, Mo. or St Louis, Mo?  Landforms have a 1 to many relationship with locations.  I can keyword "Missouri River" > landform, "St. Louis" > Missouri and "Kansas City" > Missouri.  There is only one landform labeled Missouri River. And where it coincides with  "St. Louis" > Missouri tells me where it is for this image.


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## RikkFlohr (Mar 19, 2013)

But what if I am in East Saint Louis, Illinois taking a picture toward St. Louis, Missouri of the Mississippi Queen Paddle boat as it travels down the Mississippi?


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## erro (Mar 19, 2013)

It doesn't matter Rikk, everything is solvable with hierarchical keywords. It's like magic!


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## RikkFlohr (Mar 19, 2013)

I would rephrase that to everything is easier (not solvable) with hierarchical keywords.  How can I tell in which state I pay taxes for the royalties on this image?


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## erro (Mar 19, 2013)

Probably by assigning some kind of royalty tax keywords, but american law is not something I know anything about.


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## RikkFlohr (Mar 19, 2013)

If you use the IPTC Image Data (State/Province) Field (Illinois) to say where the picture was captured FROM and Keyword what the picture is of (Missouri). When it comes to Place, I code where I am standing/capturing into IPTC and the location shown into Keywords if different. My workflow but it makes more sense than multiple locations in keywords. Just something to consider when considering your hierarchies.


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## erro (Mar 20, 2013)

I used to have a hierarcical keyword structure for location with continent, country, state, county, city, part of city:
- location
- - Asia
- - - Vietnam
- - - - Ho Chi Minh city

This is (was) handy since assigning "Ho Chi Minh city" would automatically give Vietnam and Asia to that photo. One click gives many related keywords. And makes it easy to search for all photos taken in Asia. Or Vietnam. And so on.

I chose not to use the location metadata fields because they didn't have a hierarchy, so it would require typing text into four fields for every photo. Much easier then to just click on one keyword, and get many (yes, of course you have to create the keywords, but only once).

As I upgraded to LR4 I've started using the Map module and GPS tagging (and also sometimes using GPS-enabled cameras and/or tracklogs), and let LR's automatic reverse geoencoding fill the metadata fields for Country, City and so on instead. This is also handy since one click on the map will give me multiple location metadata fields filled automatically. So I can still search for all photos taken in Vietnam and so on. But I am "limited" to whatever Google finds to be appropriate information for a location.

Every now and then, I go back to my old non-GPS-tagged photos and place them on the map. In the end, all my photos will have GPS-tags and then I can get rid of my old location hierarchy keywords, since all photos will instead have location metadata fields filled.

All of this is only to establish where I was standing whan a photo was taken. But that's important enough for me.

Then I will use keywords (in hierarchy) to describe what the photo is about, what it is showing. And that is not location. Location is my (the photographers) position. An extreme example would be a photo of the moon. The location (the GPS coordinates) for that photo would be wherever I happened to be standing on the eart at the time the photo was taken. The "description keywords" for the photo would be something like "moon". But the moon is certainly not the location.


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## Jim Wilde (Mar 20, 2013)

Very similar....in fact almost identical process, although I have now finished geo-tagging all images (apart from quite a few scans where the location isn't known). For now I'm still entering location keywords as well as the GPS location data, though I expect at some point I'll feel comfortable enough to get rid of the location keywords.


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## johnbeardy (Mar 20, 2013)

The IPTC location fields allow much more targeted uses of the filter panel and smart collections, so I always recommend entering them. I add keywords too, but keywords are very uncontrolled in data terms. Anything can be dumped into them, and often is.

And by the way, the IPTC location fields do have a hierarchy. Just set up the 4 fields in the filter panel.


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## allen-c (Mar 20, 2013)

*Places and landmasses and IPTC and GPS and thanks!*

Thanks, everyone for your feedback, your food for thought! I suppose I too have been distinguishing between the location (where my feet are) and the thing being photographed (the Firth of Forth - I don't have any photos of the Mississippi yet!) but not to the extent of putting the keywords under different top level keywords. I was wrong, I think, and I thank you for drawing my attention to that! 

I haven't been filling in the IPTC stuff at all - that seems like too much hard work to me, so if it's not being set by the camera I don't bother with it, and I really don't think I ever shall - I don't think my photos merit the extra effort.

I didn't realise that the LR mapping module filled in IPTC location information. That's good. I don't have a GPS-aware camera and I don't suppose I ever shall (I'd like to have the GPS data appended automatically but the drawbacks seem worse than the advantages and not having is cheaper money-wise though not time-wise than having) but this last wee while I've been filling in the GPS field a posteriori as best I can. It's laborious, especially when you're not 100% sure where you were, and I so seldom am!

So thanks again for your remarks - you may not have changed my life but you have set me straight(er) and given me some work to do on my LR keyword hierarchy!

Allen.


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## sty2586 (Mar 20, 2013)

Allen,
Look for the small and cheap (50 €) GPS Track logger. Independent from your camera(s) and the geotagging with LR works like a charme
franz


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## erro (Mar 20, 2013)

Or perhaps you already have a smart phone with built-in GPS? Then just download an app for tracklogging.


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## allen-c (Mar 20, 2013)

My wife has an iPhone - I'll just have to shackle her to my camera and I'll be able to tracklog to my heart's content. On the other hand, perhaps a 50 € GPS track logger might be the safer bet - it'll work even when we fall out! I thought initially that I could get her to take a photo of where we are and pick up the GPS data from the photo, but that, apparently, doesn't work with the iPhone. Thanks for that - it'll be especially useful when we go walking in Scotland.


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## Jim Wilde (Mar 20, 2013)

allen-c said:


> I thought initially that I could get her to take a photo of where we are and pick up the GPS data from the photo, but that, apparently, doesn't work with the iPhone.




What bit doesn't work? It should.

And if you're using an iPhone, have a look at the MotionX-GPS app.


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## RikkFlohr (Mar 20, 2013)

Seconded: MotionX-GPS


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## johnbeardy (Mar 20, 2013)

allen-c said:


> I didn't realise that the LR mapping module filled in IPTC location information. That's good. I don't have a GPS-aware camera and I don't suppose I ever shall (I'd like to have the GPS data appended automatically but the drawbacks seem worse than the advantages and not having is cheaper money-wise though not time-wise than having) but this last wee while I've been filling in the GPS field a posteriori as best I can. It's laborious, especially when you're not 100% sure where you were, and I so seldom am!



As you seem to use Nikon, definitely consider getting a cheap GPS device and a cheap cable which goes into the cable release socket. And suddenly you have a GPS-aware camera. It's what I've done for 5-6 years.

Tracklogs are for Canon users 

John


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## Jim Wilde (Mar 20, 2013)

johnbeardy said:


> Tracklogs are for Canon users



Snob. 

As it happens, I now have built-in GPS logging on both my Canon bodies.....granted I wouldn't call it cheap, but it's certainly effective.


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## allen-c (Mar 20, 2013)

*iPhone, GPS, and Nikon*

It's an iPhone 3 not a 3G or a 4 - I've picked up photos from her phone and I could see no GPS data and I don't see anything in the settings where to turn GPS tagging on or off. I've seen that GPS tagging is available from the 3G on - "_The iPhone 3G and all subsequently released iPhone models use A-GPS". _I wonder about connecting a GPS device to my D90 - don't you have to have it on all the time otherwise you have to wait for it to triangulate before you can take a shot? Nikon's GP-1 blurb says "Time required for satellite acquisition: Approx. 45 sec. (cold start), approx. 5 sec. (hot start)". Maybe other devices have better specs, but I'd have thought that the times would be more or less independent of the device. I wait to be refuted!


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## allen-c (Mar 21, 2013)

Actually it's an iPhone 4 so all systems are go.


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## NJHeart2Heart (Mar 27, 2013)

erro said:


> Or perhaps you already have a smart phone with built-in GPS? Then just download an app for tracklogging.
> Allen,
> Look for the small and cheap (50 €) GPS Track logger. Independent from your camera(s) and the geotagging with LR works like a charme
> franz



Hmm.. so now you all have me curious.  If the gps logger is independent from the camera, as is the gps on a smartphone, how does geotagging "work like a charm within LR"?  I'm very curious as I DO fill in the iptc info, but it can be a pain sometimes.
Dawn in NJ


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## erro (Mar 27, 2013)

You can export a tracklog from the GPS device. Then you let LR read this tracklog, and it can automatically match photos to GPS location by comparing the timestamps. So if you take an 8 hour walk and shoot 800 photos during it, it's just a few clicks of the mouse in LR to auto-tag all photos. Works really well.


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## Jim Wilde (Mar 27, 2013)

Robert's right, it does work like a charm....but only once you've got the workflow clear, i.e. getting the tracklog to a place that you can load into LR, getting the capture time or GMT offset on the photos aligned with the time-stamps in the tracklog (I believe all GPS devices record the tracklogs using UTC/GMT), after that it should just be a matter of selecting the appropriate images and telling LR to tag them.


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## allen-c (Mar 19, 2013)

I wonder how best to do this, what other people do... I currently have divided the world up conveniently into continents, and countries, and some countries into counties, départements, etc., etc. However rivers often flow between counties, sometimes between countries, and, some, no doubt, start in one continent and end up in another.

Is the best practice, I wonder, to have a separate top-line keyword tag River, and put all rivers in there, or should I stick to my approximate setup where I've stashed rivers (and mountains) inside each country and just avoid taking photos of any of those that cross inconvenient borders? What do all you Americans do with the Mississippi? And the Danube, the Nile, the Amazon? Do you have a Mississippi for each state and a Nile for every country they flow through?

And yes, I know, there are other things more important to think about!


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## sty2586 (Mar 28, 2013)

And a big advantage: After 8 hours tracking with a GPS logger, your cell phone battery is still working. 
My GPS logger works for 25 hours, with recording every 5 seconds. 
1 week holyday with 6 days skiing (approx. 6x8=48 hours) fills 11% of the memory, and the price was ~40 EURO
Franz


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## Bruce J (Mar 28, 2013)

sty2586 said:


> And a big advantage: After 8 hours tracking with a GPS logger, your cell phone battery is still working.
> My GPS logger works for 25 hours, with recording every 5 seconds.
> 1 week holyday with 6 days skiing (approx. 6x8=48 hours) fills 11% of the memory, and the price was ~40 EURO
> Franz



And, which GPS logger is this paragon?


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## sty2586 (Mar 28, 2013)

Look for *GT*-*750 Bluetooth GPS*-*logger*, mine is from the German company CONRAD; Amazon (de; uk) has it with different producers (?). Don't know where it's available in US.


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## Bruce J (Mar 30, 2013)

sty2586 said:


> Look for *GT*-*750 Bluetooth GPS*-*logger*, mine is from the German company CONRAD; Amazon (de; uk) has it with different producers (?). Don't know where it's available in US.



Thanks.  Doesn't seem to be available in the US, but it is in Canada.
Anyone else have one that they particularly recommend?


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## clee01l (Mar 30, 2013)

Bruce J said:


> Thanks.  Doesn't seem to be available in the US, but it is in Canada.
> Anyone else have one that they particularly recommend?


Since you are shooting Nikon, Why not just integrate the GPS with the image data?  I use a Solmeta Geotagger Pro 2 It has a built in battery and also will capture a downloadable track log.


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## Bruce J (Mar 30, 2013)

clee01l said:


> Since you are shooting Nikon, Why not just integrate the GPS with the image data?  I use a Solmeta Geotagger Pro 2 It has a built in battery and also will capture a downloadable track log.



Thanks for the idea Cletus.  Looks like a great solution for strictly Nikon shooters.  Unfortunately, I also shoot a lot with my small Canon, so looking for something a bit more universal.  Also, it's a bit out of my price range.  I think a small, dedicated track logger will serve my needs best, but open to any other ideas.  Cheers,


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## erro (Mar 30, 2013)

I've just started writing an "article" about handling large photo shoots, and parts of it involves GPS and tracklogs:

http://sprng.me/hup3c


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## allen-c (Apr 1, 2013)

Thanks for your "article", Robert. I resolve never ever to go on a trip with more than one camera...! I used to try to note down where I took my photos, but you've got to be organised to do that and among the many things I'm not it's that. So I've got quite a few photos I took in Japan - you know, the country situated in that part of the world where streets often don't have names - that defy the a posteriori, manual method of geotagging! Yes, it's fun switching between LR's Map module and Google Map's StreetView trying to find where to fix the drawing-pin, but mostly it's the hair on my head that suffers as I pull it out in frustration! 
Cletus' Solmeta Geotagger Pro 2 looks good but it isn't cheap. It might be good value for money, mind you.
Going back to the smartphone gps-logging solution, I wonder what it implies when you're abroad. When we go abroad I always get my wife to close it down to the bare minimum so as not see her telephone bill rocket. Can you keep your costs down by closing down phone and data use and still geolocate?  If so, good, if not, what's the minimum you need to keep open for it to work? 
The GT-750 Bluetooth GPS-Logger is available in France where I live but has (at least) 2 drawbacks: the documentation seems to be in German and the software isn't compatible with today's Google Maps. I don't know if the documentation also comes in English (I prefer to avoid _local _languages in anything involving computers!). The Google Maps problem would be more serious if true. I shall investigate farther...


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## erro (Apr 1, 2013)

Using a GPS-receiver in a phone doesn't cost anything. It just receives signals from the GPS satellites. Loading map data (displaying a visual map) can however require data communications to/from the phone and that is often expensive when abroad.

That said, GPS tracklogging as such works perfectly fine even if you turn off data communication. The only drawback is that you will not see the actual map, just the track. But once you are back home you can of course view the track on the map. The track is just a bunch of lat/lon coordinates and timestamps.

But. With my Android phone, I use Google maps, and that has an offline mode. While home, before the trip, I can download the maps I will use during the trip, and store them locally on the phone. That way I can turn off data communication while on the trip, and still have a visible map in the phone, at no cost.


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