Learning Geospatial Analysis with Python - Second Edition

Geolocating photos

Photos taken with GPS-enabled cameras including smartphones store location information in the header of the file in a format called exchangeable image file format (EXIF) tags. These tags are based largely on the same header tags used by the TIFF image standard. In this example, we'll use those tags to create a shapefile with point locations for the photos and file paths to the photos as attributes.

We'll use the Python Imaging Library in this example because it has the ability to extract EXIF data. Most photos taken with smartphones are geotagged images; however, you can download the set used in this example from the following URL:

http://git.io/vczR0

First, we'll import the libraries we need including PIL for the image metadata ...