Bus Tour Project: Geocoding
I’ve got a problem - I’m spending the next two weeks on a bus, packed with more electronics than should be legal, touring the country. Why is this a problem? Well, because while the bus is moving, and via GPS, knows exactly where it’s at, my camera doesn’t. I have a fairly old, yet entirely capable Canon 10D that I’ll be taking on the tour, but it doesn’t have one of those fancy new built-in GPS sensors. In need of a way to add GPS coordinates to the EXIF data in my photos, I came up with a project for the onAIR Bus Tour.
It turns out that there are a few different applications out there that allow you to edit JPEG EXIF data. Many of them are Windows-based or command-line only. Many of them also follow the age-old metaphor of showing data in text fields. With the plethora of open mapping solutions available to JavaScript developers, it seemed like a more fluid means of manipulating the data could be had. I wanted something that leveraged those open standards (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, HTTP, XML) and that worked across operating systems, but that also leveraged my locally available library of photos.
The basis for this project is one of my favorite new applications, Adobe Lightroom. Lightroom does a great job at getting out of the way when all i want to do is view my photos. It seemed like a perfect fit to be adapted for this application. The idea here is that you can “import” photos from your local system. Those images will be made available along the bottom of the application as thumbnail views. It should be possible to then drag one of more of those applications from the bottom bar onto a map and instantly add the appropriate GPS tags (a.k.a. geocoding) directly into the JPEG file.
Of course AIR supports deep native integration, so the possibilities are endless.
I haven’t figured out a suitable name for the application yet. Adobe Lightroom. Adobe Dreamweaver. There are so many cool product names here at Adobe, and I’ve got nothing. I’m also not quite sure how to import the photos. This might be a native menu, native drag-and-drop, both and more. While I don’t have anything more than a UI at this point, as the onAIR bus tour continues, more and more functionality will make its way behind that UI, so I’ll need beta testers too.
Does something like this fit into your workflow? Do you have feature ideas that show off AIR features? Do you have a name? A logo? Leave a comment, or better yet, find me in the crowd at any of the bus tour venues!
July 10th, 2007 at 6:34 am
I had to comment this post, this is a wonderfull I ideia and something that would make me use AdobeAIR. I’ve been trying to find the time to build some app that would work in a similar way but other more important projects stand in the way. Actually I was thinking of doing one of them using AIR but the learning curve scared my a little bit.
I’ll try to keep up with your project to offer ideias and maybe learn something in the process.
Looking at the interface, the first thing I remember that could be usefull to add is a textbox so the user can search for an area in the map.
July 16th, 2007 at 11:47 am
You could optionally tie in various data sources for location. Right now you said you drag-and-drop the photos to geocode them. But why don’t you tie into the Bus Tour location API to get the location of the bus compared against the capture timestamp of the photos to give a preliminary geotag, or at least zoom the map.
For non-Bus tour applications, you could instead point to other location API’s, such as Plazes, Jaiku, FireEagle, TwitterVision, etc. to get a user’s approximate location with the timestamp.
July 28th, 2007 at 10:38 pm
Kevin,
This would be a fantastic idea. I’ve been looking for a replacement for FlickrImportr and have not found anything close to being able to replace it.
I only recently just started geotagging (gps showed up in the last 2 weeks + vacation in Hawaii) and have been working on incorporating into the workflow.
In my opinion, there is a lack of a good industrial strength image uploader (it’s amazing how many sites/apps do multiple file upload BADLY) to the various online sites as well as a visualizer of all the trips to different places.
I would be interested in collaborating if you are open to it.
–Jauder
September 6th, 2007 at 8:54 am
Would you mind posting a few of the command line JPEG EXIF tools you have found to look good? I looking for a suitable one for an application and have not really come across anything that will fit my needs.
Thanks!