About
This is a software for displaying photos on top of
Google Maps.
It constructs a path from data received with a GPS receiver.
Then it finds the location of photos (and videos) by matching their
timestamps to the timestamps of the path generated from GPS data.
Screenshot:
See also a
live example. This might load for a while because there are so many
photos on the page.
The example is a photo album of Athens, Greece from the Grand Europe Tour me and my
friends did in the summer of 2006. Don't forget to check out the video clip of a funny guard in front of the parliament
house. He reminds me of the Monty Python sketch "The Ministry of Silly Walks" :)
Features
The software has several advanced features:
- Grouping of nearby photos
- Removal of unnecessary GPS points
- Interpolating photo positions from nearest known GPS locations
- Automatic selection of best zoom level
- Support for video clips, using JW FLV Player
How to make your own show
First you need a GPS receiver, from where you can download your path to a
computer. I'm using the
Royaltek RBT3000 GPS logger. You also need a
digital camera and a Linux computer.
Setup
First you need to install Python 2.4 with the Python Imaging Library on your Linux computer.
Install also
jhead. If you want to
have video clips on your page, you also need to install
FFmpeg
and
FLVTool2.
Then download
geotag.tar.gz and unpack it to some directory.
Next you
should copy the extras directory to your web server somewhere. Then it's time to edit
geotag.py to include the pointer to the extras-directory, your
google maps api key and the difference between your camera's
time and your GPS's time.
Usage
Copy the NMEA data from your GPS to .nmea files and the photos from your camera to the
geotag-directory. Then you can
just run the software
./geotag.py
and wait while it
creates you the album to the webpages-directory.
You can also set the time interval, which you want to present on the webpage. For example
./geotag.py 30.5.2006_12:00:00 1.6.2006_13:02:47 athens
has been used when creting the
example page from Athens.
There is also a web application which is a spin-off of this project, where you can measure distances on Google Maps.
It's located
here.
Another Google Maps application of mine is the
hybrid map server.