Show HN: Mapipedia – Map your geotagged photos

Re:Show HN: Mapipedia – Map your geotagged photos by alanbernstein on Wednesday October 21, 2020 @12:56AM (#24844848)

I checked out the demo page, and I like it. I've been trying to do something similar for a while, but instead of a long-term timeline, what I want is a view for a single trip, incorporating geotagged photos (as well as videos and GIFs or motion-jpegs), captions, separately recorded GPS tracks, waypoints, map annotations, and an elevation profile display. I want this primarily for outdoor activities like hiking trips (the only acceptable form of vacation, these days).

I recently put together the first presentable prototype for this, a quick hack using lightgallery and leaflet.js, with most of the effort being collating the photos/captions/etc. Online here: http://alanbernstein.net/trips/pecos-2020/#lg=1&slide=0

Ideally, I would love to combine the features of both of these - an overview world map and long-term timeline, with thumbnails linking to trip-specific albums.

I've found that EXIF data is extremely inconsistent, at least as reported by exiftool, among the 5-6 different camera devices represented in my various trip albums. Managing this has been a significant portion of the effort in this project.

Your page design feels a bit clunky. Also, it seems you are facing the same UI design problem as me: since it's fundamentally a photo album, the photos should fill the page, IMHO. But then that means you're stuck with an obscuring inset for the map/timeline/whatever else. I was planning to add a widget to toggle the display of my map inset element. Perhaps a better solution is to have multiple views, one for full-screen photos (like mine) and one with a smaller photo next to the other elements (like yours), with an easy way to switch between them.

Another TODO item for me that you might also like to incorporate: a button on the map to select different layers. Mine needs labels for streets/states/parks; yours might benefit from a satellite layer.

I don't really get the name. "-ipedia" is presumably borrowed from "encyclopedia", so the name "mapipedia" would make sense for an encyclopedia of map entities, like OpenLayers. Your app is a photo album, slide show, time line, personal map viewer, ... none of those are much of an encyclopedia.

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Re:Show HN: Mapipedia – Map your geotagged photos by nutinatree on Wednesday October 21, 2020 @01:32AM (#24845023)

Your site is pretty cool, thanks for sharing it! There are a lot of similarities to mine. Thanks for the other feedback. Yes, I've also been using leaflet. I've been thinking about adding other layers for say satellite view .. etc. I know how to do that and it's pretty easy. I was also thinking it might be nice to allow people to actually zoom in to the street level view so that they can actually 'virtually drive by' a location they visited on their holiday. Of course that will only be any good if there is street view available for that location (e.g. driving by a hotel you stayed at). I've not had too many issues with the EXIF data (at least for GPS and date info). The main one was just making sure the orientation was right but even that wasn't very difficult. Perhaps my site doesn't work for some types of EXIF and I don't know it yet. If you come across any please let me know.

I'm not a good UI designer by any stretch of the imagination. There is also an additional complication with the fact that it's not just a photo sharing site but it also allows CSV data to be shown on maps as well. I do have some layout options available for the CSV data (e.g. make the map full screen) but they are also clunky. I'll have to continue to think about other layout options and display toggles.

In terms of the ipedia name it's because it's more like wikipedia in that lots of people can add content and share it with others and display that content on maps. It's actually designed to be a 'pedia' for geospatial data sets. It's different to wikipedia in many ways also (e.g. no one else can edit your pages). I just added the photo mapping as another feature but it's really a subset of what the site can do. For example there's a page there for life expectancy: https://mapipedia.com/s/u/drdave/average_life_expectancy_by_...

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Re:Show HN: Mapipedia – Map your geotagged photos by alanbernstein on Wednesday October 21, 2020 @01:47AM (#24845094)

I see, I hadn't really looked at the CSV features. You're definitely addressing a slightly broader/different problem set. The mapipedia name, and the UI design choices, both make more sense to me with that in mind.

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Re:Show HN: Mapipedia – Map your geotagged photos by nutinatree on Wednesday October 21, 2020 @02:10AM (#24845185)

I wonder sometimes if I'm trying to do too much with one site. I might be better off splitting it into different sites with a specific focus on each one. However, there's not a lot of difference (from a website technical implementation) between say photos from someone's holiday and Captain Cook's first voyage (https://mapipedia.com/s/u/drdave/captain_james_cook.html) or GPS tracking of birds (https://mapipedia.com/s/u/drdave/fall_migration_of_white_sto...)

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