Are there any well functioning alternatives to the GP-E2 you guys know of? And perhaps a little less expensive than Canons' ?
If you have a smartphone, there are several good apps for generating a GPS log file similar to those generated using the GP-E2's
Log mode. On Android, the free Google Maps app comes with a supplementary activity called My Tracks that does this pretty well. On iOS, several of the popular running or cycling fitness apps have this ability.
On Mac OS X, I use
Jeffrey's Geoencoding Plugin for Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3. to add the geolocation data from the GPS log file as metadata to the image files (though the workflow can be tedious). Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 will have this capability built-in. The open source tool, gpicsync, is great, though has
somewhat limited OS X support. If you're on Flickr, you can use a webapp like
GPSTagr to add Flickr geotagging post-upload. Canon Map Utility is available by calling the parts department or comes free with ZoomBrowser EX. It can geo-encode photographs, though last I checked it only supported doing this from the NMEA 0183 file format (logged raw serial data from GPS device), but you can convert a GPX file from your smartphone using a utility.
On the off-chance you already own this camera's Wireless File Transmitter (expensive), you can add a
cheap USB Bluetooth radio and pair it with your smartphone running a GPS over Bluetooth SPP application (cheap on Android) or a standalone GPS unit that supports Bluetooth SPP. The newer file transmitter models have the radio built-in.
