Mission

To develop innovative, time-saving, and easy to use software for cameras and GPS.

• Dun & Bradstreet Number (DUNS): 03-984-9661
• GSA Contract: GS-35F-0350S

History

What started as the winning script software in a contest has turned into a company that is the world-wide leader in photo mapping software for business. GPS-Photo Link is software that maps your photos and allows you to analyze that data within a GIS system or create reports to share that information between organizations. The software saves businesses time, money and eliminates the errors often introduced during tedious manual data entry.

When the company was founded in 2001, no one was talking about geotagging or mapping photos. Few people had thought to combine a camera and gps much less use software to map the results. This was a time before the iPhone, Flickr or Google Earth. Now engineers, environmental consultants, government agencies, disaster recovery teams, conservation biologists, the oil and gas industry, foresters, emergency response teams, utility companies and many others depend on GPS-Photo Link to document and analyze data they capture through photographs. By bundling GPS-Photo Link with the Ricoh 500SE or the Nikon CoolPix P6000, GeoSpatial Experts provides customers with a full GPS photo mapping solution. GPS-Photo Link also has the flexibility to work with any digital camera coupled with a standalone GPS system to geotag or geocode photos. In 2009, 20 cell phones equipped with gps, camera and basic geo-tagging software were also compatible with GPS-Photo Link.

Mapping geotagged photos is catching on and GPS-Photo Link is carried by dealers from Asia to South America to Australia, in addition to its home market of North America. GeoSpatial Experts has partnerships with Ricoh, Nikon, ESRI, Trimble, Laser Technology and CartoPac Field Solutions.

GeoSpatial Experts, LLC was founded by Rick Bobbitt in April, 2001. Rick has a Bachelor of Science in Software Engineering and 17 years of experience programming GPS/GIS applications. He worked for several companies including Bendix/King doing avionics software, II Morrow Inc doing software for avionics for small airplanes and several agricultural technology companies. GeoSpatial Experts was founded after Rick won a Digita contest for script software he wrote using the Kodak DC290 camera and a Garmin GPS. After selling the script software for a short time, Kodak announced that they would discontinue production of the DC290. Rick then modified the software to work with any digital camera and GPS, and GPS-Photo Link was born.

In 2002, GeoSpatial Experts became an ESRI Business Partner, developing an ArcGIS Extension linking GPS-Photo Link to ESRI’s ArcGIS. This has enabled ESRI customers to easily view and manipulate their digital photos in ArcGIS.

In April of 2004, GeoSpatial Experts became a value-added authorized reseller of the Ricoh Pro G3 digital gps camera system. The primary contribution of GeoSpatial Experts was the customization of GPS-Photo Link to take advantage of camera’s capacity to include embedded GPS and user-defined fields. GeoSpatial Experts also advised Ricoh on changes to the camera that would benefit the GPS/GIS user. A new product bundle including the Ricoh camera and GPS-Photo Link was formally released by Ricoh early the following year with a major print and web-based marketing campaign. Also in 2004, GeoSpatial Experts became a business partner with Trimble. GPS-Photo Link was modified to take advantage of the Trimble receiver's bluetooth capacity linking it to the Ricoh camera. In 2005 GeoSpatial Experts became a reseller of Garmin GPS receivers and released version 3.5 of GPS-Photo Link allowing the user to see the direction of the photo.

In 2006 GeoSpatial Experts introduced Version 4.0 of GPS-Photo Link digital allowing users to display their digital photographs in the Google Earth environment. This year GeoSpatial Experts was also awarded a GSA contract (GS-35F-0350S) for GPS-Photo Link.

In 2007 GeoSpatial Experts released the GPS-Photo Link: ArcPad edition for users who want to link photos to their PDA devices in the field. U.S. and international Patent applications were filed and are pending. This software was bundled with the Ricoh 500SE camera, Trimble Juno and ESRI ArcPad to create a complete solution for use in the field.

In 2008, GeoSpatial Experts began bundling the Ricoh 500SE camera with a new Compass enabled GPS unit allowing customers to easily and accurately identify the direction they were facing when they took the picture. Since its release, the new Ricoh 500 SE bundles have become the most popular selling items. Also in 2008, due to overwhelming demand from CartoPac customers, GPS-Photo Link was made available in the CartoPac data exchange toolbar, allowing CartoPac Field Solutions users to tie multiple photos of field assets with GPS georeference points.

2009 was a big year with new products and new partnerships. March 2, GeoSpatial Experts launched two new versions of GPS-Photo Link. The GIS PRO Series combines the features of it’s Ricoh & Standard editions for GIS mapping professionals. This professional product features an ArcGIS extension allowing users to process photos from any GPS-enabled camera within ArcGIS. The new GPS-Photo Link: Express Series is the perfect tool for people who are using photos for documentation or reporting, but do not analyze the data within ArcGIS. In addition to the two new product lines, GeoSpatial Experts has a new partnership with one of the world’s leading camera manufacturers, Nikon. GeoSpatial Experts is offering a complete photo mapping solution by bundling the Nikon D5000 and GP-1 GPS with GPS-Photo Link.

GeoSpatial Experts unveiled the new GPS-Photo Link 5.0 at the ESRI User's Conference in San Diego in July 2010. Version 5.0 outputs to ESRI Enterprise Geodatabases, Access files and PDF files as well as the ESRI Shape Files, Google Earth, Word and Web pages available in previous versions. In addition, the new interface is more interactive, allowing users to apply a variety of mapping functions to their photo project and preview the results on a live digital map before generating the final output.