Today is an important step forward in the life of gpuViewer with the addition of the “where” view.

Now, instead of having just a calendar in your main view, you also have a map. The user interface stays the same: you simply zoom using the mouse wheel…

To put your pictures on the map, nothing complicated: go to a day in the calendar, click on the earth image at the top right corner of that day, and type in the name of a city. That day is now associated with that place and it will show on the map. Associating days with places, instead of individual photos, is the easiest way to sort your photos by location: because it is quickly done, you will actually do it. And when the time comes that you want to search for a particular picture, zoomin on a place and being quickly led to the day it was taken will usually be more than enough help. That’s the whole philosophy of gpuViewer put in practise: require minimal manual indexing work and make the most of it.

To achieve this feature, we rely on two fabulous online resources: Microsoft Virtual Earth provides magnificent satellite views of our earth and geonames.org provides a database of names that you can take with you. That’s right: with gpuViewer, you can geotag your photolibrary without being connected to the internet.

When you first launch gpuViewer v0.3, it’s geonames database is empty. You should use the “File/Import from geonames” menu, which will download to your computer important data like countries and regions names and codes as well as the names and location of all cities with a population larger than 1000.

This version is quite an early one, but given the power of the feature, I wanted to share it early. I’ll release a bit later a version that let you download more places from geonames, define your own spots and manage more easily days where you’ve been to several places.

Remember: this is all work in progress, and your feedback is expected !

Go to the dowload area and download your version now!

This entry was posted on Friday, March 7th, 2008 at 1:55 pm and is filed under announcements. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.