7:58 AM - Universal Taste of Terror and more photos, soon. (posted by Allen )
About 2000 photos from Universal Orlando Resort are due to be sorted and added to the gallery. These include things like the Taste of Terror event as well as visits to Aventura and Sapphire Falls hotels.

If you visit, check out Shutterbutton's at the Harry Potter area of Universal Studios:

https://www.universalorlando.com/web/en/us/things-to-do/shopping/shutterbuttons

There was a wonderful team member named Ices (?) that gets a big kudos for making something more fun than it should be. If you see her, say hi from the "birthday shirt" guy.

10:04 AM - Theme Parks and "Other" galleries updated (posted by Allen )
The "Other Places" gallery has also been updated, including additions to Texas, Iowa and Illinois (and maybe others), including:

Living History Farms
Jolly Holiday Lights
Trek Test
Blank Park Zoo Wild Lights
Amana Colonies - including Wurst Fest
...and more...

http://misc.disneyfans.com

7:41 AM - Theme Park gallery updated (posted by Allen )
Theme Park gallery updated with new photos from Lost Island Themepark:

http://themeparks.disneyfans.com/LostIsland/index.html

1:36 PM - My new tool for sorting photos based on GPS data. (posted by Allen )
Since I got my first digital camera in 1996, I have manually sorted and organized hundreds of thousands of photos in to various galleries online. I am not sure when I got my first GPS logger (around 2007, it seems), but photos after that point had GPS location data in them. For years I've kept wishing someone would make a tool to sort photos based on the GPS location.

A few nights ago, I decided to write something to do this. It can be found here:

https://github.com/allenhuffman/GPSPhotoSorter

The simple work-in-progress script lets me create outlines of areas in Google Maps, and export them to a KML file. I can then run this script on photos in a directory, referencing that KML file, and it will sort any photo with coordinates inside an area defined in the KML file in to a subdirectory of that name.

At the very least I expect to do this for first-round sorting, with a map of major areas such as: Downtown Disney, Esplanade, Disneyland and Disney California Adventure. I could then do a second pass focusing just on areas inside each park (or, perhaps, I'll just make one big map with detailed information down to the attraction).

It's not perfect since GPS data jumps around when inside a building or on cloudy days, and older GPS data was far less accurate than what a phone does today, but I expect it will save me hours of sorting on future trips.

Much more work still to be done, possibly including a GUI, but for now this command line tool can be made to work on Windows, Mac and Linux just by having Python installed and a few extra libraries. I'll be updating the documentation with full details, and probably making a video tutorial on how to use it, in the future...

3:29 PM - Adventureland’s Phantom Fall Fest (posted by Allen )
Our local amusement park, Adventureland in Altoona, Iowa, started a new Halloween event this year. The park is owned by Palace Entertainment, and is using the same event name they use at their Kennywood park — Phantom Fall Fest.

To help get this new page on my haunted house site in the search engines, I just wanted to mention it here…

https://dmhauntedhouses.com/phantom-fall-fest/