[GIS] Extracting GPS coordinates from a large number of photos and then bring them into ArcMap as a shapefile

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Long story short I'm doing surveying work and there is some debate on my team about whether or not pictures were taken in certain areas or if they were mislabeled and taken in the wrong sample area.

We use a GPS enabled camera and it is easy to check each photo individually by copying the lat&long from the exif data and loading it into GIS and seeing if it is within the Sample polygon that we were supposed to inspect.

Is there a way to do this process for hundreds of images and to make them into a shapefile with all the points?

I have tried searching for a program that can do this but have come up short. It seems like a pretty basic process, but I don't know much in the way of programming or anything like that. It would also be good to export them to an excel file with each row containing the filename of the image and the Lat&Long coordinates.

Best Answer

To do this there is a GeoTagged Photos To Points tool which:

Creates points from the x-, y-, and z-coordinates stored in geotagged photos. Optionally adds photo files to features in the output feature class as geodatabase attachments.

It gets its geotagged photos from:

The folder where photo files are located. This folder is scanned recursively for photo files; any photos in the base level of the folder, as well as in any subfolders, will be added to the output.

Related Solutions

ArcMap – Convert Points to Polygons of Specific Size Using Point as Center

Import your photo points to a shapefile (Make XY Event Layer).
Buffer the points to the appropriate size of your photos.
Install the bounding containers toolbox and run the extent tool. This will create a north orientated square around the buffer.

Alternatively look at building a raster catalog. This may not be suitable if you have a lot of overlap, but will let you display the images without individual georeferencing.

Geotagging Photos and Creating Shapefile from Coordinates

you can use python for getting EXIF info:

from PIL import Image
from PIL.ExifTags import TAGS
from pprint import pprint

def getexif(im):
    res = {}
    try:
       img = Image.open(im)
       info = img._getexif()
       for tag, val in info.items():
           dec = TAGS.get(tag, tag)
           res[dec] = val

    except IOError:
       print im
    return res
    pprint res

then use python ImageDraw module for drawing text or anything.

import ImageFont, ImageDraw

def drawtext(im):
   op = ImageDraw.Draw(im)
   fnt = ImageFont.truetype("tahoma.ttf", 12)
   op.text((5, 5), "YourText", font=fnt)

Best Answer

Related Solutions

ArcMap – Convert Points to Polygons of Specific Size Using Point as Center

Geotagging Photos and Creating Shapefile from Coordinates

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