Geolocating photos on the map
Photos taken with GPS-enabled cameras, including smartphones, store location information in the header of the file, in a format called EXIF tags. These tags are largely based on the same header tags used by the TIFF image standard. In this recipe, we'll use these tags to create locations on a map for some photos and provide links to open them.
Getting ready
You will need to download some sample geotagged photos from https://github.com/GeospatialPython/qgis/blob/gh-pages/photos.zip?raw=true and place them in a directory named photos in your qgis_data directory.
How to do it...
QGIS requires the Python Imaging Library (PIL), which should already be included with your installation. PIL can parse EXIF tags. We will gather the filenames of the photos, parse the location information, convert it to decimal degrees, create the point vector layer, add the photo locations, and add an action link to the attributes. To do this, we need to perform the following steps...
