I just got back from the trip to Key Biscayne. I'm still messing with the pictures but I have put some up on the Home Gallery. More to come in the near future.
Archive for March, 2010
Google Maps and Such
Posted on March 12th, 2010 by Ryan Reed
Recently, during some boredom, I started working on pulling the GPS coordinates from some of the photos I had taken. It was mostly to get ready for some vacation to Florida, Vegas, and hopefully later, Europe. I thought it'd be cool to be able to show on a Google Map. It would allow me to upload photos while on a trip and have them show up on Google Map as we went.
So the first issue I came across was getting the GPS coordinates to my photos. I don't have a GPS attachment for my camera and don't really want to have to buy one. They're not cheap. An app that myself and Randy McCaig tested on the way to Texas last year was an application for the iPhone called GeoTag. Basically, you'd give it the photo naming convention (ie DSC_0001.jpg) and then hit the capture button to capture save the GPS coords, which would be sync'd back to the photos later. The app did a great job as it would increment to the next photo name (DSC_0002.jpg) but wasn't as preferable as we had to remember to hit the capture button everytime a photo was taken.
I found another app that wasn't specifically designed for this use but would be more efficient and automated. Trailguru allows for tracking of biking, hiking, walking, driving, etc. It records the GPS coordinates over time, speed, etc. You upload the trail info after recording to their website and their site allows for exporting as a GPX file. After recording the trail, you can take the exported file and use an application like HoudahGeo to sync the GPX file with the images, based on the time taken of the photos. You only really need to leave the application running on the iPhone and sync up later. Works really well after testing.
The second issue was creating a script to map out the photos on a Google Map. It took a while but I finally managed to get the script to read all the images in a directory and display them on a map. Needs a few changes so that it displays the thumbnails when the marker is clicked but it's working a lot better then I expected.
Above is a test of both Trailguru and the Google Maps script I was working on. Both worked really well and I expect to be tweaking and using the script in future vacations and such. Maybe I'll put the script up for others to use. Ah, who knows?