Yesterday, being Good Friday, I didn’t have to work. So I went on a hike up at the Opal Creek Wilderness. It’s was a beautiful day–around mid 70’s up in the mountains. My guidebook said the trail was a 7 mile out and back. My GPS said 6.6 when I got back to the car. But then the actual GPS track said 8.3 miles. I think the track is bigger because we walked around a bit more, but also because I didn’t turn off tracking when we stopped for lengths of time (such as at the end of the trail). I think the GPS “wanders” when it’s not moving. So I guess I’ll just call it 7 miles.

Here’s a KMZ file that you can open with Google Earth. The file will display the route I walked and it has pictures from the hike that are geocoded into the track. If you don’t have Google Earth (or don’t want to download it), here’s the same stuff in Google Maps.

I successfully did this once before, but it’s been a while so I had to relearn all the steps. Just to fill up the outboard brain with more knowledge, here are the basic steps I followed (mac-centric, but I’ve seen similar stuff for PC…hint: RoboGeo):

• Sync GPS time and digital camera time at the trailhead
• Enable “tracks” on the GPS
• Take pictures while you hike. If you dawdle for very long, turn off tracks, but remember to turn it back on when you start walking again
• When you return to the trailhead, turn off tracks on the GPS
• Back home, download the pictures and the track from the GPS. I always have a little trouble with the track part (getting it out of the Garmin PC-based mapping software). This time I used GPSBabel, and it worked like a charm. It’ll grab data from your GPS unit, and it’ll convert that data into a TON of different formats. Very useful.
• Once you have your track and your pics, you’ve got to combine the data streams. I use GPSPhotoLinker. It has a few different options for matching up the timestamps on the track and the pictures. Great software. It also has an option for pulling tracks off the GPS directly. I never got that working, so GPSBabel to the rescue!
• Now that you’ve got your pictures geotagged, you can use the iPhotoToGoogleEarth plugin for iPhoto. It’ll output your geotagged photo into the KMZ or KML format. If you’ve already got your track loaded in Earth, just drag/drop it into the new photo “Place” to combine track and photos. DONE!

Edit: once you have your Google Earth KML file, you can stick that thing on a server and view it through Google Maps just by putting the URL of the KML file into the Gmaps search box and hitting enter. If you are displaying images you’ll need to provide references to images available online. Flickr works well for this. Just edit the KML file in a text editor.