Gregory Todd Williams

I’ve finally gotten the GPS connection working with my D200, and am loving the simplicity of it all: turn on GPS, turn on camera, wait for satellite fix, take pictures, enjoy the extra geospatial metadata.

This is much better than the process I used with my D70 which involved always making GPS track logs, insuring that the camera’s clock was synchronized with the GPS, downloading and converting the track logs to an appropriate format, and using interpolation to guess where a photo was taken based on the (temporally) closest track point. This new system also has the advantage of keeping the metadata with the photo (embedded as EXIF data) instead of tagging along as associated RDF or requiring manual embedding with something like GPSPhotoLinker.

Instead of paying the exorbitant price for the official Nikon GPS cable (which annoyingly provides a 9-pin serial connection for the GPS, much too large a connector for a handheld device that is just inches away from the camera), I ordered a much cheaper custom cable from Pc-Mobile. Despite their website not providing much confidence in their reliability or trustworthiness (several pages are dedicated to instructions on what to do if your package never arrives), I’m now a satisfied customer (after sorting out what I had thought was a shipping problem from Hong Kong, but turned out to be incompetence at the local post office).

A nice touch to the Pc-Mobile solution is the availability of a custom plastic mounting platform for holding a GPS in place on top of the flash shoe. It even comes with a square of velcro with which to affix the GPS. Very cheap and effective. Time will tell if the cheaper cable turns out to work as well as a Nikon one would have, but it seems to be working well so far, and I’m happy to have GPS data in my recent photos.