Edit Geography Bulk?

DodgeV83 · August 18, 2005

Putting in the location information for every picture gets old fast! Will there ever be a way to do it in bulk, like when adding keywords...etc?

{JT} · August 18, 2005

This will be coming soon.

DodgeV83 wrote:

Putting in the location information for every picture gets old fast! Will there ever be a way to do it in bulk, like when adding keywords...etc?

muddyknees · August 18, 2005

{JT} wrote:

This will be coming soon.

I'll be looking forward to this!

I've tried a few shareware utilities that do this reasonably well, such as WWMX, Quakemap, Topofusion, Robophoto. I also use DNRGarmin (which interfaces well with ArcView GIS). I've also tried "rolling my own" photo-tracklog timestamp matching and imagemap creation using map images and tracklog files from USAPhotomaps which has been a particular favorite "mapper" of mine, although Google certainly does have a slicker interface.

I hope to find some time soon to EXIF-geocode and re-upload some of my Yosemite photo's for which i have stored tracklogs, to see how your current feature works.

In particular, I'm curious whether I can get make it automatically "zoom in" to just the "bounding rectangle" that contains my gallery of geocoded photo's from a particular local excursion - what I've seen from the examples posted so far is that one starts out zoomed out to the entire globe! Thats rather useless if your excursion is by foot rather than by jet!

Gary

muddyknees · September 3, 2005

Quakemap and Smugmug integration coming soon?

{JT} wrote:

This will be coming soon.

I noticed on Qaukemap's web site http://www.earthquakemap.com/ that there is the following announcement:

Store your digital photos with smugmug.com - watch this site for updates. QuakeMap and Smugmug.com integration coming soon...

Is this an independant effort or are you folks cooking up something cooperatively? Either way, there are a lot of possibilities here - at least for US customers, since Quakemap relies on the Terraserver maps that only cover the US, but this would allow photo's to be pinpointed with finer detail in most areas than with the current Google imaging - down to about 1 foot/pixel "resolution" using 1 meter/pixel greyscale arial photos.

Of course, still need a bulk way to place the GPS coords into the exif, and Quakemap doesn't currently do that, even though it can currently read them. Fortunately there is a free way to do that in bulk, using one of the utilities that is part of WWMX.

Gary

colourbox · September 3, 2005

I tried this the other night and had a comment. Edit Geography can auto-locate a street address, but I was trying to locate coordinates for a place within a national park. It can't be done by street address, so I entered the coordinates found on www.lat-long.com. I wanted to adjust the coordinates until they reflected exactly where I was in the park. But once the coordinates are entered, there doesn't seem to be a way to refine them without changing the numbers a tiny bit and then checking the map, which takes a long time. I hope that we'll have the ability to enter "rough" coordinates, see it close up on the map, and then have some easy way of nudging them to the exact, final location, such as dragging the little marker around and applying the coordinates represented by the new position.

Andy · September 3, 2005

fine-tuning the geography coordinates

colourbox wrote:

I tried this the other night and had a comment. Edit Geography can auto-locate a street address, but I was trying to locate coordinates for a place within a national park. It can't be done by street address, so I entered the coordinates found on www.lat-long.com. I wanted to adjust the coordinates until they reflected exactly where I was in the park. But once the coordinates are entered, there doesn't seem to be a way to refine them without changing the numbers a tiny bit and then checking the map, which takes a long time. I hope that we'll have the ability to enter "rough" coordinates, see it close up on the map, and then have some easy way of nudging them to the exact, final location, such as dragging the little marker around and applying the coordinates represented by the new position.

actually, it's very easy to do this with just your mouse. enter the address info, or lat/long if you have some approx lat/long. then on the map screen, simply use y our mouse to indicate a new spot on the map. the lat/long update automatically.

i did this very thing to show different spots at the nyc public library

cheers

colourbox · September 3, 2005

Thanks! I guess I must have been getting confused about the click language in the map. Apparently now that I "get" it, one click resets the marker and double-click re-centers the map.

However, I see now that I didn't state the problem very well. This is what is happening. If I'm in Edit Geography, and I want a rural spot in the Midwest, and I type in Lat. and Long., I have two choices for entering that data:
- I can click "Lookup Address." Unfortunately, that returns Address Not Found and the editable marker map centered on the default smugmug HQ locaiton, because I entered lat/long with the address blank. Manual map navigation across the country is necessary.
- My second choice is to click Update under lat/long, but the problem there is that it kicks back to the image, not to the editable marker map. Now the image is recorded with incorrect coordinates and I have to find another way to the editable map.

The way this must be done, since entering lat/long will not work, apparently, is to feed the address lookup with some kind of address than can be looked up and is close enough that you don't have to scroll the too far. Only then can the marker map can be edited in the correct region.

For similar reasons, if I choose Edit Geography for an image that already has lat/long entered, there's no button in there that will take me to that location on the map. The only way to see the editable map, that I know of, is to enter the closest address again, essentially starting over.

If I'm still missing something, fire away!

Andy · September 3, 2005

it's not perfect yet...

colourbox wrote:

Thanks! I guess I must have been getting confused about the click language in the map. Apparently now that I "get" it, one click resets the marker and double-click re-centers the map.

However, I see now that I didn't state the problem very well. This is what is happening. If I'm in Edit Geography, and I want a rural spot in the Midwest, and I type in Lat. and Long., I have two choices for entering that data:
- I can click "Lookup Address." Unfortunately, that returns Address Not Found and the editable marker map centered on the default smugmug HQ locaiton, because I entered lat/long with the address blank. Manual map navigation across the country is necessary.
- My second choice is to click Update under lat/long, but the problem there is that it kicks back to the image, not to the editable marker map. Now the image is recorded with incorrect coordinates and I have to find another way to the editable map.

The way this must be done, since entering lat/long will not work, apparently, is to feed the address lookup with some kind of address than can be looked up and is close enough that you don't have to scroll the too far. Only then can the marker map can be edited in the correct region.

For similar reasons, if I choose Edit Geography for an image that already has lat/long entered, there's no button in there that will take me to that location on the map. The only way to see the editable map, that I know of, is to enter the closest address again, essentially starting over.

If I'm still missing something, fire away!

if i need to mark a spot that's not an address (e.g. 123 main street, anycity, st, zip) i will use google earth to find the lat/long, it's simple!

google earth, free download

zoom to your spot, read the lat/long, and enter it manually. fine tune as needed.

colourbox · September 3, 2005

Thank you, I now remember you mentioning the Google Earth app in another map thread. This will help a lot. I'm a Mac guy, but I have a PC around to run GE on.

Andy · September 3, 2005

colourbox wrote:

Thank you, I now remember you mentioning the Google Earth app in another map thread. This will help a lot. I'm a Mac guy, but I have a PC around to run GE on.

yep -- and here's to google making google earth mac-friendly <img src="https://us.v-cdn.net/6029383/emoji/deal.gif" border="0" alt="" >

andy <-- a mac guy now, totally, since january this year when i switched after 20years using pc.

colourbox · September 3, 2005

I'm not worried about it. Google is one company that actually tells you that Mac support is coming, in contrast to companies who don't even bother.

JamesJWeg · December 3, 2005

{JT} wrote:

This will be coming soon.

long "soon" there, or did I miss something?

James.

Andy · December 3, 2005

JamesJWeg wrote:

long "soon" there, or did I miss something?

James.

Hi James - no, you haven't missed anything. Thanks for letting us know how important this is for you!

All the best,

JamesJWeg · December 3, 2005

Andy wrote:

Hi James - no, you haven't missed anything. Thanks for letting us know how important this is for you!

All the best,

It would be sweet if you could save a location with name and select it out of a list or something of that sort.

James.

Andy · December 3, 2005

So there could be a confusion here:

"Bulk Geography" has been mentioned in several posts. One thing I wouldn't want is to apply the same lat/long to 25 pics in a gallery -- all of the pushpins on the map would be on top of one another!

Just clarifying one point....

Allen · December 3, 2005

Andy wrote:

So there could be a confusion here:

"Bulk Geography" has been mentioned in several posts. One thing I wouldn't want is to apply the same lat/long to 25 pics in a gallery -- all of the pushpins on the map would be on top of one another!

Just clarifying one point....

This is one thing I was playing with. Locating on the
map where each photo was taken. See example here.
It could be very useful for pre-planning a photo op
for a certain location.

I run Goggle Maps on the side to get the lat/lon and
adjust the numbers to move each photo. Micro moves
involves adjusting the 3rd and forth decimal place.
Al

Andy · December 3, 2005

Allen wrote:

This is one thing I was playing with. Locating on the
map where each photo was taken. See example here.
It could be very useful for pre-planning a photo op
for a certain location.

I run Goggle Maps on the side to get the lat/lon and
adjust the numbers to move each photo. Micro moves
involves adjusting the 3rd and forth decimal place.
Al

Yeah that's fine - I just wanted people to for sure know what would happen if all lat/long were the same for all shots in a gallery

Mike Lane · December 3, 2005

Andy wrote:

Yeah that's fine - I just wanted people to for sure know what would happen if all lat/long were the same for all shots in a gallery

It'd be great to have it like the bulk keywords though. All the images lined up on the page with the lat long entry to the side. You wouldn't necessarily want/need the ability to input the same lat or long for each photo, but it'd be cool to be able to enter multiple photos at a time.

JamesJWeg · December 4, 2005

Saving a fixed location under a name would allow someone to use that to get close, currently it is a real pain to even find a general area. Oviously they wouldn't want 25 pins in one spot. Would there ever be a way to place a pin on a gallery instead of just one photo?

James.

Nikolai · December 4, 2005

Any chances...

{JT} wrote:

This will be coming soon.

Of surfacing those new fields in API, including lat/long?

That would help a lot..

Andy · December 4, 2005

Nikolai wrote:

Of surfacing those new fields in API, including lat/long?

That would help a lot..

put it in the APIs forum, and Don will see it....

colourbox · December 4, 2005

Andy wrote:

"Bulk Geography" has been mentioned in several posts. One thing I wouldn't want is to apply the same lat/long to 25 pics in a gallery -- all of the pushpins on the map would be on top of one another!

Yes, I ran into this when I got lazy and pasted the same coordinates into several photos that were on the same street. I decided to manually drag them up and down the street slightly to spread them out.

Which leads me to a suggestion. If you allow bulk geo entry, I'd like to see a function you could call something like "autospread" that would offset each photo slightly. Say I enter a location for 20 photos. When I click Save, smugmug maps slightly offsets the photos from each other around the entered location so they can be seen separately and dragged to their actual nearby locations on the map. At first I thought it should offset them in a circle around the entered location, but if smugmug was to go for it with this feature, maybe there would be options. For instance, maybe you could choose from circle, horizontal line, or vertical line. That could make it easier to position a whole gallery of photos along a parade route, for example.

I'm not saying that is the ideal implementation, and you guys are always good at coming up with something better than what's requested. But that's the general idea.

Oh wait...I just thought of this...enter two locations and distribute gallery photos along the line connecting them!!! Or (going crazy here) what if we could paste a curvy path from Illustrator, then smugmug aligns its first endpoint to the entered geo location, and distributes selected photos along that curvy path! (A man can dream, can't he?)

dwil · February 24, 2006

Or how about showing a single pushpin per identical lat/long

I would like to have the option to have a saved "Home", "Grandma's", etc...

garyjwood · February 25, 2006

colourbox wrote:

... For instance, maybe you could choose from circle, horizontal line, or vertical line. That could make it easier to position a whole gallery of photos along a parade route, for example.
... Or (going crazy here) what if we could paste a curvy path from Illustrator, then smugmug aligns its first endpoint to the entered geo location, and distributes selected photos along that curvy path!

Just remember that Latitude/Longitude coordinates are not on a Cartesian grid. For most applications we can assume that the north-south distance between two latitudes is constant (forgetting for a moment the Earth's oblateness.) However, the east-west distance between two longitudes ranges from 0km at the poles to about 111km at the equator.

So any calculations involving distances between lat/long coordinates requires some funky spherical trigonometry. Not impossible, just CPU-intense.

pdvtokyo · March 13, 2006

At a loss... with Geography
Hi Andy
I have tried countless times all of your, and other people's, suggestions re. using Google Earth to find latitude / longitude but am still having no luck. When I type (or paste) lat/long coordinates into Google Earth it zooms in exactly to the place in question. But when I try to do the same using Smugmug Geography page, the place mark always ends up on some other part of the map. Also, it appears that it is possible to physically move a place marker to the desired location but, again, I have not been successful. If you could offer any advice, I would appreciate it. BTW I am using a Mac and this is my first post here. Thanks!

Andy wrote:

actually, it's very easy to do this with just your mouse. enter the address info, or lat/long if you have some approx lat/long. then on the map screen, simply use y our mouse to indicate a new spot on the map. the lat/long update automatically.

i did this very thing to show different spots at the nyc public library

cheers

Andy · March 13, 2006

pdvtokyo wrote:

Hi Andy
I have tried countless times all of your, and other people's, suggestions re. using Google Earth to find latitude / longitude but am still having no luck. When I type (or paste) lat/long coordinates into Google Earth it zooms in exactly to the place in question. But when I try to do the same using Smugmug Geography page, the place mark always ends up on some other part of the map. Also, it appears that it is possible to physically move a place marker to the desired location but, again, I have not been successful. If you could offer any advice, I would appreciate it. BTW I am using a Mac and this is my first post here. Thanks!

Are you putting the lat / long in to edit geography and clicking update? Here's a small tute:

http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=17276

welcome to Dgrin!

Mike Lane · March 13, 2006

garyjwood wrote:

Just remember that Latitude/Longitude coordinates are not on a Cartesian grid. For most applications we can assume that the north-south distance between two latitudes is constant (forgetting for a moment the Earth's oblateness.) However, the east-west distance between two longitudes ranges from 0km at the poles to about 111km at the equator.

So any calculations involving distances between lat/long coordinates requires some funky spherical trigonometry. Not impossible, just CPU-intense.

The google earth maps (and google maps maps) are probably either a conic or a cylindric projection. Actually it probably depends on where on the planet you're looking and what the zoom range is. At any rate, the calculations for point to point distance are likely much easier than you'd think.

colourbox · March 14, 2006

garyjwood wrote:

Just remember that Latitude/Longitude coordinates are not on a Cartesian grid. For most applications we can assume that the north-south distance between two latitudes is constant (forgetting for a moment the Earth's oblateness.) However, the east-west distance between two longitudes ranges from 0km at the poles to about 111km at the equator.

So any calculations involving distances between lat/long coordinates requires some funky spherical trigonometry. Not impossible, just CPU-intense.

You might have misunderstood what I was originally getting at. I don't expect multi-point placement to place points exactly at precise locations the first time. I only suggested it as a way to drop multiple points in the same general area or along a general path so that they can be dragged to their final positions more quickly, instead of entering one by one.

Let's say I go to a park and I don't have a GPS unit. Instead of going to Google Earth, locating all the coordinates visually, and transcribing them into smugmug, why not just drop a gallery's 10 markers in the park in smugmaps and drag each of them to their photo locations. We'll drag this beach photo marker to the beach on the map here, one to the picnic table where we had lunch, one to the old fort...wow that was quick!

pdvtokyo · March 14, 2006

At a loss...2
Andy
Thank you for the reply. Have followed your instructions to a T but still unable to get correct coordinates. I go into Edit Geography, type in lat/long details, hit Update but then do not get the Searching For/Lat/Long/Submit option on the right hand side of the page (as shown on your page). Instead I only get a thumbnail of the photo. Likewise, when I type in the 5 Coogan Boulevard 06355 address it takes me to NY but there is no option to submit nor does a place mark appear. I live in Tokyo but don't think that would be a problem... or would it?
Thank you

bluemeanie · July 2, 2006

Hi,

It was mentioned that bulk update of geography data was in the works sometime in 2005 but it hasn't made it yet. Is it likely that this feature will be implemented anytime soon? It's a bit of a PITA to hand edit each image.

johndoc · July 3, 2006

Possible solution

colourbox wrote:

Thanks! I guess I must have been getting confused about the click language in the map. Apparently now that I "get" it, one click resets the marker and double-click re-centers the map.

However, I see now that I didn't state the problem very well. This is what is happening. If I'm in Edit Geography, and I want a rural spot in the Midwest, and I type in Lat. and Long., I have two choices for entering that data:
- I can click "Lookup Address." Unfortunately, that returns Address Not Found and the editable marker map centered on the default smugmug HQ locaiton, because I entered lat/long with the address blank. Manual map navigation across the country is necessary.
- My second choice is to click Update under lat/long, but the problem there is that it kicks back to the image, not to the editable marker map. Now the image is recorded with incorrect coordinates and I have to find another way to the editable map.

The way this must be done, since entering lat/long will not work, apparently, is to feed the address lookup with some kind of address than can be looked up and is close enough that you don't have to scroll the too far. Only then can the marker map can be edited in the correct region.

For similar reasons, if I choose Edit Geography for an image that already has lat/long entered, there's no button in there that will take me to that location on the map. The only way to see the editable map, that I know of, is to enter the closest address again, essentially starting over.

If I'm still missing something, fire away!

If I understand your problem, I think I stumbled into a solution. I found that if I type (or paste) the latitude and longitude into the address field, separated by a comma ("40.000,-75.000"), the lookup function dutifully goes to that location. Then you can fine tune via Google Maps. I have done this on files with previous lat and long by copying and pasting each in turn into the address field and manually adding the comma.

Copying the entire string before I click the lookup button is useful for sequentially entering geography information for a group of photos that are all near one another.

Hope this helps.

Edit Geography Bulk?

Comments