Archive from March 2023

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...