GPS photo tagging experiment

I recently bought a Garmin eTrex Vista Cx and like every new toy, I’ve got to play with it until something breaks. Until then, I’ll squeeze in some useful work. Using Robogeo to geocode the location info onto my photos, I’ve assembled a quick and dirty Google Map page. Most of these are just some shots taken from the car at various intersections to see if the location is close enough for more detailed uses.

Click here to go to map

Here’s some thumbnails of the pics I took. They link to the originals, which are rather large, especially the photostitched ones.

Here's R2D2

Amana & Kanunu St.

Amana & Makaloa St.

Marv

Free USGS topos

This may only be of interest to civil engineers and planners, but topographic maps generated by the U.S. Geological Service are public domain because tax payer monies are used to generate the maps. However, map services have charged for these maps because it costs money to print and distribute the physical copies.

This has changed somewhat recently when a collection was taken up by these guys to liberate these maps. The maps are now distributed by the Internet Archive and can be downloaded for free from this “temporary” directory. It is organized by state, and the maps are in TIF format. XML meta-data files area also available.