The Whelming

Like many people, I take a lot of pictures with my phone. After all, the best camera is the one you have with, and phone cameras produce high quality pictures these days. And like many Wikimedia volunteers, sometimes I take pictures thinking “this should go on Commons/Wikipedia/Wikidata”. But then days pass, and I don’t remember which things I took a picture of, or it becomes too much of a hassle to find, upload, and use them in Wikimedia projects.

Now, I back up the pictures from my phone to a disk at home automatically, instead of cloud. Also, I have the geolocation in pictures set to “on”. As a result, I have (tens of) thousands of pictures on my disk that have a geolocation in their EXIF data. However, that’s where it ends; the data is just hidden there. So recently (well, yesterday), I wrote a little command line tool called img_coords, which can scan a directory structure for pictures with EXIF location data, and aggregate that data into a single file (KML or GeoJSON), using the file path as point label.

As a final step, I added a new function to my trusty WikiShootMe! tool. “Load GeoSJON” from the burger dropdown menu lets you load a valid GeoJSON file, which then gets displayed as an additional layer. This includes GeoJSON you create with the img_coords tool. You can then see the locations of where you took pictures, next to Wikidata items (with/without image), Wikipedia articles, etc. Clicking on one of the blue GeoJSON dots shows the label, in my case the path of the file on my local disk. For Mac/Linux, the label turns into a link that you can copy&paste into a new tab (it’s a local file so your browser won’t just let you click on it). You can now esaily find Wikipedia articles and Wikidata items you have taken a picture of, by location. Happy uploading!

UPDATE: Now with thumbnails!

This was written by Magnus. Posted on Friday, May 19, 2023, at 12:27. Filed under Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.

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