Mapping Gallery To Google Earth
I’ve been trying to find more time to play with kml and Google Earth and that time finally came today. Recently I upgraded from Gallery 1 to Gallery 2 which uses a MySQL database on the backend instead of the old disk storage method. It also allows custom fields to be set on images (which was available in later versions of Gallery 1). Unfortunately none of my images have GPS EXIF data so I just found the location of a few test images using Google Earth and created a new custom field for the location, using a similar format to that used by the Google Earth bounding box parameters.
The result is pretty cool. If you have Google Earth installed, you can see the result by clicking here*. A PHP script selects all the images with locations from Gallery’s database and formats its output as KML. The whole thing, including reading the KML docs, took about an hour. If I could find something like GPSPhotoLinker for a real computing platform, I’d be set to document the upcoming trip to Spain. Somebody should make a GPSPhotoLinker type module for Gallery.
* Note the images I used were fullsize so it will probably take a second for them show up in the description when you click on a placemark. I’ll switch to smaller thumbnails later.
