Geolocating photos

Photos that are 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 based largely on the same header tags that are used by the TIFF image standard. In this example, we’ll use those tags to create a shapefile with point locations for photos and file paths to the photos, as attributes.

We’ll use the PIL in this example because it has the ability to extract EXIF data. Most photos that are taken with smartphones are geotagged images; however, you can download the set used in this example from https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Learning-Geospatial-Analysis-with-Python-Fourth-Edition/raw/main/B19730_09_Asset_Files/photos.zip:

1. First, we import the necessary libraries. We use glob for file pattern matching, os for operating system interaction, Image for image manipulation, and shapefile for dealing with shapefiles:

   import glob
   import os
   try:
    ...