Cycles de Oro 2008 Tour to Tanglewood TR Photos and Map

Thanks for the kudos. This idea has been around a long time but only after getting the Forerunner has it become really practical and likely to actually happen. I'm starting to think I'll wear the Forerunner whenever taking photos a lot, especially when being a tourist as I so often am even on training rides. Battery life would be an issue in some situations, like hiking and camping away from electricity, but I bet one could rig up a solar panel to fix that. Before, with the Garmin Vista handheld, something would happen...batteries die, a hard knock or button pressed in the pack turns off the unit, or I simply couldn't bear to carry one more item. The Forerunner is there and turned on when rolling, so that data is taken care of. It'd be cool if the memory stick or some similarly shaped adapter could have a GPS receiver in it. For the photo thumbnails, the camera knows what time it is when it takes a photo and the Forerunner definitely knows the location for a particular time, so it just takes some software to write the location from the GPS into the data stored in the .jpg photo. (The Forerunner knows time down to a nanosecond, as the timing is in the atomic clocks in the satellites...comparing the time reported from several satellites is how the GPS triangulates or multiangulates your location, so the time must be and is extremely accurate. The satellite times are highly synchronized so they're the same down to .000000001 second, but the time reported to the Forerunner at any given moment will vary by how far away each satellite is from the Forerunner. Then it's down to math to figure out where you are from where the satellites are. This is why more sat signals means more accurate location.) Just set the camera time to be close to the GPS time...within a second or two is good...and it can even be more. In this set I had to correct for about 22 seconds difference as the last time I set the camera time was probably four to six months ago. Most digital cameras store the time and other info (shutter speed, focusing, more) in what's called EXIF format. (In fact, I use a program to rename the photos based on the original EXIF date and time stored in the .jpg photos from the camera.) The Forerunner, even in the plain Garmin Training Center that comes with it free, can save and export a single skate, bike, run, walk, or several events, in .tcx format. [You can convert .tcx to the more popular .gpx, but some programs understand .tcx now.] For each photo, the software finds the location in the GPS data at the time the photo was taken, and writes that into the EXIF data of the photo, so the location becomes part of the data stored in the .jpg file. This is a privacy issue if you don't want every location of every photo to be known to everyone on the web. Also, newer, more expensive cameras are including GPS so this correlation isn't necessary. Another piece of software takes the photos with location data in the .jpg files and creates a Google Earth file that shows the GPS route and places the thumbnails on the map. Maybe I'll write a tutorial once I settle on the software I like best. For the speed map, it's a matter of simply exporting the .tcx data for an event and setting a few parameters at gpsvisualizer.com to generate the map. You could make the colors vary by heartrate or by elevation, too, and I may make a couple of those for fun. The background could be satellite photos or other map styles or even the virtual earth kind of map. I like the topo map, but had to make it a bit transparent so it wouldn't conflict with the colors in the route. Another level of coolness would be to have the weather conditions as reported at the closest station plotted along with some of this. I think motionbased.com has a bit of that data incorporated. Again, all of this has privacy implications, but I guess I don't mind the world knowing how slow, with how much heartrate, I'm slogging along where. As I often say, and I mean it when I say it, even if it doesn't come true...more on this later, ha!