Share your Travel Photos with GIS

I’ve just returned from a trip to China. Part business part pleasure. Having a smartphone ensured I took plenty of photos and video. I’ve been asked a number of times since my return to ‘send some photos’. It made me wonder: is there a way to share your travel photos with GIS?

Share your Travel Photos with GIS

Esri have recently introduced the notion of storymaps; these are application templates which can be easily extended and customized. These templates are responsive meaning they look good on phones, tablets and PC’s. One template in particular caught my attention. It seemed perfect for sharing both the photos and the story of my trip. The results I will show at the end of this post, but they far exceeded my expectations. Let me walk through the process of setting up the application:

1) Prepare Web Map – Log in to your arcgis.com account. Choose ‘my content’ and create a new map. Zoom to place of interest, choose a base map and and share.

2) Choose Storymap Template – In the share screen, choose ‘Make a Web application’ and and select Map Tour. From drop down choose Publish

3) Create Service – Go back to my content and open the web application you just created. Select ‘I need to host my pictures’. Give the new Feature service a name and create service.

4) Prepare Pictures – Click Add and drag first image to tour point pop up. Add information about the picture.

5) Geo-Locate picture – Move the picture to the correct location and save. In my case I forgot to enable geo-location addition to picture on my smartphone. The app – and i’ll need to test this – may read this data and automatically place the photo at the correct location. If so no need to ‘move the picture’. Cool.

6) Finished – Share the map with everybody, and send link to family, friends and colleagues

See China Storymap for the end result.

We have set up a development team which is focused on providing Web and mobile apps for non-GIS folk. Location technology has so many potential applications. Reaching a wider audience presents many new and exciting possibilities.

Tags: Acgis online, application development, ArcGIS.com, ESRI, GIS, mobile, storymap, travel photos

Categories: ArcGIS Online, Web and mobile GIS

This entry was posted on Friday, November 1st, 2013 at 6:55 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.