Summary
Because smartphones are nearly ubiquitous, they provide some unique capabilities for GIS. Photos captured with these devices include metadata that includes geographic coordinate information for each photo. This information can be read using Python and stored in a local feature class with the ArcPy Data Access module. Using a reverse geocoding process, it is also possible to determine the nearest address where the photo was taken. Finally, to enable this data on the web for sharing, the Python dropbox module can be used to upload these photos to a file-sharing platform and then integrated with the uploaded feature class data using ArcGIS Online.
