GPS Assist with a Sony Cyber Shot HX5V on a Mac

An updated article available HERE

At the weekend I purchased a new Sony Cybershot HX5V digital camera. It is a very good, small camera with 10Megapixel, 10x optical zoom, built in GPS for Geotagging, and compass, HD 1080i video recording, plus whole load more neat features. The camera does pick up GPS signal, though was taking ages to pick up the GPS  location. The camera does have a feature called GPS Assist, which annoyingly only has the feature to download the GPS Assist data in its Windows version of its software. As I use Macs I don’t want to boot up Virtualbox everytime I want to update the GPS Assist data  so it gets location within seconds rather than minutes.

After a bit of Googling I managed to find someone who has written a small app for OSX which downloads puts the GPSAssist data on the camera for you. The address of the project is https://code.google.com/p/gpsassist-update/. Since using it, camera is picking up the location within seconds, actually also getting a location when indoors occasionally now, when wasn’t getting one at all previously.

Which means that now I can use places with all pictures I take now, rather than just the ones I have taken with my iPhone, and the movie files the camera records can be edited within iMove which is also great.