Geotagged Photos

[joewheaton]

Many have asked to see geo-tagged photos in Riverscapes projects. I'm incorporating this in the Planning LTPBR projects and I know @nick4rivers will include it in his LTPBR Design stuff.

Manual Option

ESRI has an easy way to do this where you just put your Geotagged photos in a folder (inside project if you want it there), and point to it and run this really simple geoprocessing tool. It produces a shapefile that points to pictures and grabs geotag to make shapefile.

This article ellaborates.

Then we just plug it in project.

Requests

Open Source Photo Point Generator

@philipbaileynar asked to see if @MattReimer could figure out an open-source alternative to this (i.e. for generating the shapefile and attribute table from photos with geotags on them in a folder like a Riverscapes Project folder).

Riverscapes Features

• Right Click Photo type and Add to map: If geotagged photos are in a RS project folder, then one shapefile or geojson object gets generated from them and anytime a user wants to add any photo to the map (by right click) it does.
• Right Click and View geotagged photos should bring up a nice looking dialog that allows preview of photo, navigating by advancing to next or previous photo, and highlights (by select) the photopoint in the photopoint shapefile on map and zooms at same zoom level to that photo in map, and show photo metadata below on same dialog.

[MattReimer]

Interesting idea. We could extend one of the nodes to always allow photo additions and geotagged photos could be a kind of geo dataset.

The contribution back is tricky but the xml itself shouldn't be too hard

[philipbaileynar]

I'm giddy with excitement for this feature. It has the same "exponential utility" as RAVE itself.

A few random thoughts:

• A generic feature whereby any riverscapes project type could just have a subfolder called "Photos" containing JPGs with corresponding node in the project file. No other metadata or individual photo listing the project file. When RAVE sees this folder it builds the ShapeFile on the fly and adds it to the map.
• A Python script that takes an existing riverscapes project and a folder of JPGs. It extracts the EXIF metadata from each JPG and writes it both as XML in the project file and as a ShapeFile. RAVE then knows how to display this ShapeFile. Any riverscapes developer could use this script during their project generation.

Implicit in all our suggestions is that we are talking about baking photos into many kinds of riverscapes projects rather than storing them in a dedicated "photo" project type. (Not that such a thing couldn't exist in parallel.)

[joewheaton]

Awesome ideas @philipbaileynar

[joewheaton]

@philipbaileynar this might be a good one for @nick4rivers to work on as he has done a bunch of this for QRiS. I think this should be broken out into the different actionable tasks needed for:

• [x] Defining Photo Types in RiverscapesXML
• [x] ArcRAVE here
• [ ] QRAVE
• [x] QRIS
• [ ] WebRAVE

I think we should prioritize this after we understand how much work it is.