While we were travelling around Italy in 2006, I was carry a gps unit, logging our position. When we got back, I merged all of the pictures with the GPS tracks, and had geotagged photos.

I still needed a mechanism to display them. I didn't want to store the images on someone else's server, and the few gallery applications that I found didn't impress me, so I wrote my own. It still has a long way to go before I'd consider actually releasing it.

The process of geotagging was made possible by:

Hardware:

Software:

gpsd to log where we were
gpsbabel to convert the NMEA logs to GPX
Geo::Track::Log to infer position at a point in time from the GPX track file
Image::ExifTool to read and write the spatial position into the images.
HTML::Mason to take a directory full of images, extract all of their EXIF tags, and build up HTML and javascript to feed to
Apache::Imager::Resize automagically cache and resize images
the google maps API, which does all of the heavy lifting

Todo:

display all of the images in a directory underneath the map -- a high level map.
Allow search/filtering based on tags inserted in the EXIF comments.
display images that are less than 10px apart on the highest zoom setting in the same box.
Allow users to apply tags?

Someone else's bug..

It turns out that upgrading Image::ExifTool fixed the image corruption problem. Applying the GPS tags was inserting invalid tags into the jpeg files.

jack | posted Mon Oct 23 21:00:09 2006 | updated Mon Oct 23 22:31:50 2006 | #
category: website/gallery

CPAN is full of wheels..

CPAN (Comprehensive Perl Archive Network) is a goldmine of useful perl modules. Like Apache::Imager::Resize,
which does all of the heavy lifting of resizing and caching images for a photo
gallery.

As a result, I now can easily display all of the pictures in an album beneath the map.

Next would be some Javascript to pan to a picture when you click on the picture..

jack | posted Thu Oct 19 17:39:45 2006 | updated Mon Oct 23 20:54:13 2006 | #
category: website/gallery

A few small gallery updates.

I made a few updates to the Italy photos.

(some) EXIF information is displayed, now.
Images have been properly rotated.
High HDOP points on the GPS tracks have been filtered out, and the photos re-geotagged.

I was hoping that filtering the GPS tracks for high HDOP points would get rid of some of the geotagging errors (like in the Volterra
album), but it didn't seem to.

I think I will import the GPS track into GRASS and see if I can't massage it a bit. It'll also give me a chance to merge in data from my heart rate monitor, and make
pretty pictures of me trying to keep up with Tam cycling up Tuscan hills.

jack | posted Thu Oct 12 08:55:33 2006 | updated Tue Oct 17 09:53:41 2006 | #
category: website/gallery

Remaining albums up..

I've merged position information into about 1469 of the 1908 photos that we took in Italy, and uploaded them to the website. The GPS data needs some
massaging, but at least we can look at everything, now.

There are a few remaining things that I'd like to do:

Display the EXIF tags
Display the GPS tracks
Rotate the pictures properly
handle the resizing of pictures in mod_perl
allow edit-in-place for tags, and comments

jack | posted Tue Oct 10 16:26:27 2006 | updated Tue Oct 17 09:53:31 2006 | #
category: website/gallery

Pictures from Venezia (Venice)

I've merged the GPS tracks into the exif tags for the (most) of the pictures we took in Venezia (Venice) on September 19th, and September 20th.

The geotagging albums requires work:

Display EXIF tags
Display GPS tracks
Display picture icons instead of the deault google markers

jack | posted Tue Oct 10 10:05:19 2006 | updated Tue Oct 17 09:53:22 2006 | #
category: website/gallery