Deduce geolocation from photos taken the same day

[Kraymer]

Hi, discovered your project on HN, looks like something I could use :)

Regarding the problem of photos with unknown location, the current solution consist to run the update subcommand on them.
But say I have this folder tree :

├── 2015-06-Jun
│   ├── California
│   │   ├── 2015-06-29_16-34-14-img_3900.jpg

and an unknown location photo named 2015-06-29_17-07-06-img_3901.jpg
I think it would make the workflow even more painless, if I could ./elodie.py import --propagate ... or something that would deduce that the photo has been taken in Cali since one half hour I took another one in this place.
A little magic/dangerous so should probably be turned off by default but does it make sense to you ?

Regards

[jmathai]

@Kraymer That's an interesting idea. Do you have that scenario often where one photo is missing geolocation information but others around it contain some?

The idea of a "fuzzy match" option is a good idea. Something is better than nothing.

[jmathai]

Also, have a look at gh-16 for something similar that we added support for.

[zingo]

One probably quite comment scenario would be different sources for the images, on vacation I use both my mobile camera and a compact camera, only the mobile camera has geo location.

[zingo]

Didn't think about if the "multiple persons involved" senario, there might not be a good way of knowing to what picture a unknow'n should be matched. So a user option might good if this was implemented.

[ibizaman]

@zingo I suppose you could use the exif apn name to match pictures taken by one person.

[jmathai]

I think this is more of a UI question. One idea is to extract specific EXIF tags from a source photo and apply them to a set of target photos.

From the command line it would look something like this.

./elodie.py apply --location --source="/path/to/file/with/accurate/exif/location.jpeg" \
  /path/to/file1.jpg \
  /path/to/file2.jpg \
  /path/to/file3.jpg

I think doing this manually at first is okay and it can be automated later if we think it's too cumbersome and we can do it well.

[Ramblurr]

I agree @jmathai there should be a general way to extract then apply metadata from a photo onto a set of photos.

For me the use case is definitely GPS. Photos taken on my phone have geolocation metadata, but my DSLR photos don't.

Also at the moment I'm hesitant to use --location on directories that have these photos mixed together. The smartphone photos have exact coordinates I don't want lost. Whereas the DSLR photos, I just want to get them geotagged to a general area (city, region, etc).

But right now --location will overwrite the more specific geolocation on my smartphone photos. I can workaround this by being creative with the list of photos I pass to elodie's update (update .... ./.JPG for the smartphone vs ./.ARW for the dslr etc).

In addition to extracting and applying metadata, another --create-or-ignore / --create-only / --ignore-if-exists flag to update would be useful. (maybe I should move this to a new ticket?).

Example:

# this command would only add the GPSInfo metadata to
# media files that do not already have the tags
elodie update --create--only --location "Paris, France" /pics/my/2016/Paris Trip

[jmathai]

@Ramblurr I run into this problem myself as well. I like the flags you suggested. Should probably consider what the default action would be if one of the flags were not used. I would error on the side of not clobbering data.