San Jose Walk - June 6, 2009

I'm involved with some open source software projects. I've been looking after the Windows build for the exiv2 library. This library reads and writes the metadata in digital images. Metadata is information about the photograph. Not the image, metadata is data about the image. So it includes the camera model, date and time, camera settings and so on. It is possible to add the location of the photo and this is called "GeoTagging". I wrote my own GeoTagger in Python about a year ago and I'm very pleased with it. You'll notice on the "big versions" (not the thumbnails) of the photos below it is possible to click on a link to "Google Maps" or "Google Earth". This is possible because the photos have been "GeoTagged". There's an article about this: click here.

By the way, to spot images which have been GeoTagged - look for the icon:

I promised Stani - the dynamo behind the Phatch photo batch processor, that I'd write an action to provide GeoTagging. And he asked Nadia in Dublin, Ireland to help me. I went out for a little walk in San Jose to get some exercise, take some photos and capture some GPS data. I think I have already geotagged all the photos in my library - so I had to collect new data for testing with Phatch.

While out for a walk, I realised that there's a "Dublin" monument in the Discovery Meadow in San Jose. I have run and walked past there hundreds of times without giving it any special thought. However because Nadia's helping me, I thought "got to take a picture of that". And I went for brunch in Lowery's Irish Coffee House in Guadalupe Park. I think Dublin is a twin-city with San Jose and that makes a lot of sense. Dublin also has a major presence in the world of technology and of course San Jose is "The Capital of Silicon Valley".

Lightbox click here - 4.89 mBytes download