Pro Photo Tools

Chris has details on the recently released Microsoft Pro Photo Tools that provide extra functionality beyond Windows Live Photo Gallery.  The Microsoft Pro Photo Blog provides some more insight on what the tool can do:

Microsoft has released the first version of Microsoft Pro Photo Tools with geotagging today.   Microsoft Pro Photo Tools provides a set of tools for photographers to perform various tasks with their images—including RAW captures. Download the current version to quickly geotag your photos, view and edit numerous metadata fields and much more, leveraging the power of Windows, Microsoft Live Local and Microsoft Virtual Earth.

Features include:

  • address to latitude/longitude conversion
  • latitude/longitude to address conversion
  • loading track routes stored by GPS devices
  • placing images on track routes based on time stamps, with a visual adjustment tool
  • integration with Virtual Earth for
      -- text based location searches
      -- interactive placement of photographs
      -- visualization of track routes
      -- 2D and 3D map browsing

The integration with Virtual Earth is a cool thing to happen.  It allows me to quickly add geographic information to my photos to record where they were taken.  You can then do interesting things with Virtual Earth itself like this mashup that someone has created in Popfly mapping their photos onto the globe.

Big drawback for me is that the tool is 32bit only (James smacks forehead on desk) so I won't be able to run it on my laptop :-(