Team Mojoski's 3D Photo Galleries

This is the place where we post the 3D photo galleries of some of the hikes we take together. If you'd like to be able to view these photo galleries, all you need to do is install a copy of Google Earth and click on the links below!

A Few Tips: Be patient while these files download and Google Earth gets started up. It sometimes takes a little while to get cranked up and rolling. And when it does finally load, let the landscape download so you can see the shape of the mountains clearly before you start moving the landscape. But when the landscape is loaded, definitely play around with the controls in the upper right corner of Google Earth so you can rotate the mountain around and see where we went. The 3D vision of the environment is what makes this fun to play with! And don't forget that the whole point of these galleries is for you to be able to click on the purple camera icons to see the pictures.

We hope you enjoy them! Please let me know if you have any problems viewing them!

January 31st, 2009

Pinhoti Trail (On the Georgia/Alabama State Line)

This is a recent hike we took with lots of our Geocaching friends. Thanks go out to Sam and Barbara for setting up the event. We had a wonderful time with everyone! This is also the first 3D gallery that our new dog blue made it into.

After installing Google Earth, click here: Pinhoti_Trail.kmz (~12MB)

March 16th, 2008

Pine Log Creek - East & West Loop Trails (Northeast of Cartersville, GA)

This is another beautiful set of new trails in Bartow County. This trip we brought along two of our buddies, Evan and Dylan, and we also met my good friends Brian and Sissy at the trail head. It was a beautiful day for hiking and geocaching, and we really enjoyed the 4.2 mile hike!

After installing Google Earth, click here: PineLogCreek_3-16-2008.kmz (~11MB)

January 13th, 2008

Pine Mountain - East Loop Trail (East of Cartersville, GA)

This one is getting a little bit better. Make sure you zoom in on the summit of Pine Mountain. There are about 8 pictures up there.

After installing Google Earth, click here: Pine_Mountain_East_Loop_1-13-2008.kmz (~7MB)

January 12th, 2008

John's Mountain, near Chestnut Ridge (West of Resaca, GA)

This was my first attempt at creating a 3D photo album. It's a pretty good one, but you can tell I'm new at this. This was a geocaching trip and most of the track was captured in the car.

After installing Google Earth, click here: John_Mountain_Hike_1-12-2008.kmz (~4MB)

How did I do that?


Well, the first thing I have to do is get the clocks in my digital camera and GPS device synced up within a couple of seconds with each other. Then I turn on the track recording on my new Garmin eTrex Vista HCx and capture a track during the entire hike. As I capture photos on the trail, my camera is automatically recording the date and time into the headers in the photos. I usually turn the track recording on at the trailhead, and then turn it off when we get back to the car so that the track is only representing the hike itself, instead of leaving track recording on all the time.

Now when I get back home I have a bunch of digital images with embedded timestamps marking the time they were taken, and I also have a GPS track log (in the form of a GPX file) that covers the entire hike time. I have my GPS set to crecord a plot on the track every 15 seconds, so the times are never off by much.

When I get home, the first thing I do is scale the images down to something easier to download with Picassa and export them to a fresh folder, so that the eventual photo gallery won't be too big for a reasonable download file. Picassa doesn't mess when timestamps when doing the scale down work, and any tool that works that way should be fine. It is important since the next step requires that the timestamps be intact.

The next thing you need to do is combine the timestamps with the GPS track log and that is handled by another free bit of software called GPicSync, by Google. It can encode the appropriate lat/long values from the GPX track into the headers of the images, and them spit them all out as a KMZ file that Google Earth can view. Once I get that basic KMZ file I can open it in Google Earth and add better titles for the images and add some comments about them as well.

I hope this little description was helpful, in case you want to try making your own 3D Photo Galleries. All you need is a GPS device that can export track logs and a basic digital camera. All the software I used was free. Email me if you have any questions!