I've not found a good solution for easily mapping my geotagged photos (images that contain GPS data) and sharing them. I wanted something that made it not only easy to view the photos, but to also see the location on a map, to zoom in easily to that location, to easily see the order of the photos and the trajectory of the travel as well as see the date/time the photo was taken and make it easy to share with others. I also didn't want to have to download any software and I wanted the free option to still have a lot of good features.
As a result I decided to create my own webapp. It satisfies all the above as well as converting the GPS data to a human readable location (Country and City) and calculates approx "as the crow flies" distances in km.
Yeah, I know, this is like the worst time in the history of humanity to be promoting an app that allows people to show off their travel photos given all the COVID restrictions in place now. I'm kind of hoping that people have some old geotagged photos of holidays they might want to share or perhaps they're still doing a lot of travel within their own countries.
Photos can be imported from the local device or via a public link Apple iCloud, Google Photos, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Dropbox and Flickr. Make sure the original photos are being used as often when photos are resized or compressed the location data is stripped away.
You can try it with as many photos as you like for free if you don't want to save the page/photos to the server. You can also save up to 100 photos in (one webpage) to the server for free and the page will expire after 30 days (create as many pages as you like).
Perhaps don't try importing too many photos on your first test so you can quickly see if it's working and get a feel for how long you might have to wait if you want to import more photos. Avoid selecting videos as they won't be mapped and they could massively increase the amount of time you have to wait for the photos to get mapped.
Warning: some browsers, like Safari and some Android ones, strip away geotag metadata when you import photos into a webpage. If you have this problem try zipping them first (and importing the zipped file), or get a public link to a cloud platform (you can kill the public link once the photos are imported). Or copy the photos to a computer and upload using a different browser.
I'm fully expecting people to find bugs. Every time I test it on another device I seem to find more bugs but now I've run out of devices to test it on and all known bugs have been fixed. I've been driving any relatives, friends, and strangers on the street nuts because I'm always grabbing their device to do testing! Well, I was joking about the strangers on the street ... but now I'm going to strangers on the internet ... i.e. YOU. I'd love for you to contact me with any feedback, or just to say hi (always happy to hear from a fellow nerd): https://mapipedia.com/contact_us. Thanks!
I checked out the demo page, and I like it. I've been trying to do something similar for a while, but instead of a long-term timeline, what I want is a view for a single trip, incorporating geotagged photos (as well as videos and GIFs or motion-jpegs), captions, separately recorded GPS tracks, waypoints, map annotations, and an elevation profile display. I want this primarily for outdoor activities like hiking trips (the only acceptable form of vacation, these days).
I recently put together the first presentable prototype for this, a quick hack using lightgallery and leaflet.js, with most of the effort being collating the photos/captions/etc. Online here: http://alanbernstein.net/trips/pecos-2020/#lg=1&slide=0
Ideally, I would love to combine the features of both of these - an overview world map and long-term timeline, with thumbnails linking to trip-specific albums.
I've found that EXIF data is extremely inconsistent, at least as reported by exiftool, among the 5-6 different camera devices represented in my various trip albums. Managing this has been a significant portion of the effort in this project.
Your page design feels a bit clunky. Also, it seems you are facing the same UI design problem as me: since it's fundamentally a photo album, the photos should fill the page, IMHO. But then that means you're stuck with an obscuring inset for the map/timeline/whatever else. I was planning to add a widget to toggle the display of my map inset element. Perhaps a better solution is to have multiple views, one for full-screen photos (like mine) and one with a smaller photo next to the other elements (like yours), with an easy way to switch between them.
Another TODO item for me that you might also like to incorporate: a button on the map to select different layers. Mine needs labels for streets/states/parks; yours might benefit from a satellite layer.
I don't really get the name. "-ipedia" is presumably borrowed from "encyclopedia", so the name "mapipedia" would make sense for an encyclopedia of map entities, like OpenLayers. Your app is a photo album, slide show, time line, personal map viewer, ... none of those are much of an encyclopedia.
Your site is pretty cool, thanks for sharing it! There are a lot of similarities to mine. Thanks for the other feedback. Yes, I've also been using leaflet. I've been thinking about adding other layers for say satellite view .. etc. I know how to do that and it's pretty easy. I was also thinking it might be nice to allow people to actually zoom in to the street level view so that they can actually 'virtually drive by' a location they visited on their holiday. Of course that will only be any good if there is street view available for that location (e.g. driving by a hotel you stayed at). I've not had too many issues with the EXIF data (at least for GPS and date info). The main one was just making sure the orientation was right but even that wasn't very difficult. Perhaps my site doesn't work for some types of EXIF and I don't know it yet. If you come across any please let me know.
I'm not a good UI designer by any stretch of the imagination. There is also an additional complication with the fact that it's not just a photo sharing site but it also allows CSV data to be shown on maps as well. I do have some layout options available for the CSV data (e.g. make the map full screen) but they are also clunky. I'll have to continue to think about other layout options and display toggles.
In terms of the ipedia name it's because it's more like wikipedia in that lots of people can add content and share it with others and display that content on maps. It's actually designed to be a 'pedia' for geospatial data sets. It's different to wikipedia in many ways also (e.g. no one else can edit your pages). I just added the photo mapping as another feature but it's really a subset of what the site can do. For example there's a page there for life expectancy: https://mapipedia.com/s/u/drdave/average_life_expectancy_by_...
I see, I hadn't really looked at the CSV features. You're definitely addressing a slightly broader/different problem set. The mapipedia name, and the UI design choices, both make more sense to me with that in mind.
Related: I wish the Google Photos API would expose geotags so I could back up my photos with location data. This would also simplify the implementation of tools like this one.
You can select "download all" from the drop down menu in Google Photos and that will give you the original photos with the geotags. That should do the trick for your backups anyway without the need for an API (at least if you're happy to download one folder at a time anyway).
And yes, I agree that if the API did support getting the geotags that would make tools like this one easier to implement.
The CSV import is nightmarish. The blank page link to get started needs to be a lot more obvious, and if your data must be tab separated then it's not really CSV, is it?
It looks great, but although I have a lot of CSV files with geolocation data, the elaborate normalization required to try it doesn't really seem worth the effort.
I'd love to help you get your geolocation data mapped.
I've been giving your feedback some more thought. I think I'll make changes to allow comma separated files to be used as well. The reason I've avoided it so far is because some countries use commas as the decimal separator but there are ways around that. I was also thinking it's easier to just paste from Excel as that makes iterating through updates easier.
I'd also be interested in what normalization issues you had because I can probably make some changes to make that easier as well.
Here is an example of a page that used geolocation for tracking birds. The size of the circles represent the height (you can literally see them pulsing as the sleep each night and fly during the day). You can open up this link, download the data, modify it and paste it back in. You can't overwrite someone else's page but you can then save it as your own:
https://mapipedia.com/s/u/drdave/fall_migration_of_white_sto...
I've just implemented the ability to handle comma separated data (it converts the commas to tabs under the covers so it can use the old code) but at least that should be one less obstacle in the way.
Thanks for the feedback. I agree it could probably be made better. I think the easiest way to do it is probably to find an example page that does something similar to what you're after (hopefully you can find one) and then export that CSV data/gps data as a starting point. I agree that that they're not really CSV but most people seem to get confused if you talk about TSV for tab formatting. The reason TSV is used is to that you can just paste from Excel directly into the page.
I much more common use case for people using camera gear, not smartphones:
most digital cameras don't have GPS tagging, but we carry our phones with us. some of us use google maps timeline, which records all our movements and we can download this as a CSV. for privacy concerns, one can use a gps recorder app instead. if we can match the timestamps of the kml / kmz / gpx file with the timestamp of the camera photos (and adjust timezone differences), then we can geotag digital camera photos that initially have no geotag information. the tools that are out there who do this are cumbersome and difficult to use.
I tried to do exactly this a couple months ago as a "lockdown project". Agree it is quite cumbersome, requiring Adobe Lightroom, a third-party plugin, and also running a python script to convert to GPX. And if you haven't diligent about keeping your camera's clock accurate across timezones and daylight savings time, you're in for even more hassle.
Interesting idea. I think that would be pretty easy to implement. How much demand do you think there would be for that? If people are so worried about privacy that they don't want to turn the gps on their phone on do you think they would want to use a tool like this?
Yeah, I completely understand the desire for privacy. I think everyone should be careful with privacy. This app is really designed for people who want others to know about where they've been for a specific event like a holiday. Or perhaps you want to show someone all the McDonalds stores that you've been to, or all the locations of photos from work inspection sites around the city, or where a particular animal was spotted ... etc. So rather than sharing 60 photos with friends and then having to explain where they were all taken the map will automatically do that for you. There are different privacy options as well so if you only want some people to see your photos and locations you can have some control over that. There is also an option so that only the person entering the photos can see them (and only when they're logged in).
You can even just use the app to view your photos on a map without even saving to the server so the photos never leave your computer (you won't be able to save the result but you can still view it in the browser without having privacy concerns).
As a result I decided to create my own webapp. It satisfies all the above as well as converting the GPS data to a human readable location (Country and City) and calculates approx "as the crow flies" distances in km.
Yeah, I know, this is like the worst time in the history of humanity to be promoting an app that allows people to show off their travel photos given all the COVID restrictions in place now. I'm kind of hoping that people have some old geotagged photos of holidays they might want to share or perhaps they're still doing a lot of travel within their own countries.
A demo of a web page with some photos can be seen here: https://mapipedia.com/s/u/drdave/demo.html. There's some documentation at https://mapipedia.com/help_import
Photos can be imported from the local device or via a public link Apple iCloud, Google Photos, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Dropbox and Flickr. Make sure the original photos are being used as often when photos are resized or compressed the location data is stripped away.
You can try it with as many photos as you like for free if you don't want to save the page/photos to the server. You can also save up to 100 photos in (one webpage) to the server for free and the page will expire after 30 days (create as many pages as you like).
Perhaps don't try importing too many photos on your first test so you can quickly see if it's working and get a feel for how long you might have to wait if you want to import more photos. Avoid selecting videos as they won't be mapped and they could massively increase the amount of time you have to wait for the photos to get mapped.
Warning: some browsers, like Safari and some Android ones, strip away geotag metadata when you import photos into a webpage. If you have this problem try zipping them first (and importing the zipped file), or get a public link to a cloud platform (you can kill the public link once the photos are imported). Or copy the photos to a computer and upload using a different browser.
I'm fully expecting people to find bugs. Every time I test it on another device I seem to find more bugs but now I've run out of devices to test it on and all known bugs have been fixed. I've been driving any relatives, friends, and strangers on the street nuts because I'm always grabbing their device to do testing! Well, I was joking about the strangers on the street ... but now I'm going to strangers on the internet ... i.e. YOU. I'd love for you to contact me with any feedback, or just to say hi (always happy to hear from a fellow nerd): https://mapipedia.com/contact_us. Thanks!
Cheers,
David
I recently put together the first presentable prototype for this, a quick hack using lightgallery and leaflet.js, with most of the effort being collating the photos/captions/etc. Online here: http://alanbernstein.net/trips/pecos-2020/#lg=1&slide=0
Ideally, I would love to combine the features of both of these - an overview world map and long-term timeline, with thumbnails linking to trip-specific albums.
I've found that EXIF data is extremely inconsistent, at least as reported by exiftool, among the 5-6 different camera devices represented in my various trip albums. Managing this has been a significant portion of the effort in this project.
Your page design feels a bit clunky. Also, it seems you are facing the same UI design problem as me: since it's fundamentally a photo album, the photos should fill the page, IMHO. But then that means you're stuck with an obscuring inset for the map/timeline/whatever else. I was planning to add a widget to toggle the display of my map inset element. Perhaps a better solution is to have multiple views, one for full-screen photos (like mine) and one with a smaller photo next to the other elements (like yours), with an easy way to switch between them.
Another TODO item for me that you might also like to incorporate: a button on the map to select different layers. Mine needs labels for streets/states/parks; yours might benefit from a satellite layer.
I don't really get the name. "-ipedia" is presumably borrowed from "encyclopedia", so the name "mapipedia" would make sense for an encyclopedia of map entities, like OpenLayers. Your app is a photo album, slide show, time line, personal map viewer, ... none of those are much of an encyclopedia.
I'm not a good UI designer by any stretch of the imagination. There is also an additional complication with the fact that it's not just a photo sharing site but it also allows CSV data to be shown on maps as well. I do have some layout options available for the CSV data (e.g. make the map full screen) but they are also clunky. I'll have to continue to think about other layout options and display toggles.
In terms of the ipedia name it's because it's more like wikipedia in that lots of people can add content and share it with others and display that content on maps. It's actually designed to be a 'pedia' for geospatial data sets. It's different to wikipedia in many ways also (e.g. no one else can edit your pages). I just added the photo mapping as another feature but it's really a subset of what the site can do. For example there's a page there for life expectancy: https://mapipedia.com/s/u/drdave/average_life_expectancy_by_...
c.f. https://github.com/angryziber/picasa-gallery#picasaweb-retir...
And yes, I agree that if the API did support getting the geotags that would make tools like this one easier to implement.
It looks great, but although I have a lot of CSV files with geolocation data, the elaborate normalization required to try it doesn't really seem worth the effort.
I've been giving your feedback some more thought. I think I'll make changes to allow comma separated files to be used as well. The reason I've avoided it so far is because some countries use commas as the decimal separator but there are ways around that. I was also thinking it's easier to just paste from Excel as that makes iterating through updates easier.
I'd also be interested in what normalization issues you had because I can probably make some changes to make that easier as well.
Here is an example of a page that used geolocation for tracking birds. The size of the circles represent the height (you can literally see them pulsing as the sleep each night and fly during the day). You can open up this link, download the data, modify it and paste it back in. You can't overwrite someone else's page but you can then save it as your own: https://mapipedia.com/s/u/drdave/fall_migration_of_white_sto...
If you don't want to go into detail in this forum feel free to reach out via the contact page: https://mapipedia.com/contact_us
most digital cameras don't have GPS tagging, but we carry our phones with us. some of us use google maps timeline, which records all our movements and we can download this as a CSV. for privacy concerns, one can use a gps recorder app instead. if we can match the timestamps of the kml / kmz / gpx file with the timestamp of the camera photos (and adjust timezone differences), then we can geotag digital camera photos that initially have no geotag information. the tools that are out there who do this are cumbersome and difficult to use.
In case you're interested, I wrote up the steps I took here → https://geoffruddock.com/geotag-lightroom-photos-with-google...
Fully agree with your POV.
I prefer never geotag my photos, but if really would need to do that — would do it in offline with FLOSS desktop & mobile apps.