[Feature] Function taking string as input, retrieves the BBox for that

[Rubix982]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. It's not always feasible for humans to know the coordinates of a location. Numbers are already harder to remember, more so longer floating values like coordinates, and it can be annoying for users to go and handpick the coordinates. However, it is very easy to remember the names of locations, e.g., 'Cairo, Egypt'.

This function will return a bounding box of that location, which can then be fed into the API for the Mapillary Python SDK, for which results can be returned as desired.

Describe the solution you'd like Some function that does all the underlying location -> coordinates logic at the low level. Either we make a utility function that users can use, or we make something as simple as the solution that osmnx suggests, which is just taking in a string, and outputting some results for that, not bothering users deal with the numerical logic as well

Describe alternatives you've considered NA

Additional context This idea was slightly discussed in the 1st Maintainer Meeting on the 24th of June

[Rubix982]

Blocker

Since we are moving forward on Bounding Box aspect, I was looking around to solve this issue, and I found this library, GeoCoder. It provides an abstraction on top of Google APIs and Bing APIs for GeoSpatial data, but it needs an API key of its own.

I looked at Mapbox's API for Forward and Reverse GeoCoding, it also needs an API key.

[cbeddow]

It sounds like the way to go here is to make OSMnx a dependency to be able to use the functions here? https://github.com/gboeing/osmnx/blob/main/osmnx/geocoder.py

[Rubix982]

I mentioned osmnx somewhere - but forgot to add here. Thanks for the headsup, @cbeddow!