I have long wanted to be able to post visual stories where I can show a map of a place with specific pictures. If you go to the “Map View” of iOS Photos, or the “Map” view in Adobe Lightroom Classic, you can see sort of what I was looking for. There are many ways to view geo-tagged photos on a map, but not as many to be able to create a map for sharing.

What I wanted was to be able to tell a visual story, like a hike or travel day, and have it displayed in context. I wanted to be able to place this in a blog (perhaps even here!?). I wanted it to be easy: throw a few geo-tagged photos into a directory, run a script, and get my annotated map and scaled images. I saw there are WordPress plugins that will do this available for purchase, but they all rely on Leaflet or Google Maps and involve a lot of view-time dependencies. Furthermore, I don’t like Google Maps because anyone who views my story would be tracked and analyzed by the evil advertising algorithm.

The WordPress plugins are also more interactive than I need. I don’t necessarily want the ability to zoom, or scroll away from my specified region, or list all of the restaurants within the view.

So, to make a long story short, I’ve started to write the script I want. It’s an ugly PHP script that reads the geographical data from a folder full of JPGs. It uses a free account at MapBox to download map tiles and assembles the background. Then it draws the locations of each photo along with a direction indicator (also extracted from the EXIF data of the photos), ordering them by the time the picture was taken. It scales the images to a web-appropriate size, then it slaps together a primitive web page with the labeled map and just enough Javascript to display the photos in a “lightbox” effect when you click on the location. Once it’s generated, there are no external dependencies and the entire thing fits in about 4 kilobytes (not including the images).

Here’s an example in Ventura, California, and another in Mar Vista, California.

These raw outputs are fine, but if I wanted, the HTML is easy to edit to make more friendly. For example, I could replace the filenames in that right-hand column with descriptions.

There are some interesting challenges. It turns out the coordinates that the iPhone injects into the EXIF data are usually pretty accurate, but when I wandered around a small park and took pictures, in some cases the coordinates were off by a dozen meters or so. The compass direction tends to be more accurate, except in rare cases where it’s completely way the heck off. I don’t know if it’s magnetic interference, the fact that the orientation of the phone changes when one lifts it to take a picture, or what is the cause.

I should probably come up with a better strategy for overlapping photo points. It might be nice to anti-alias the circle that’s drawn. I could also potentially avoid drawing on the map at all, but rather use CSS to draw the locations within the web page. That would allow easier visual customization (at the expense of bigger file sizes and more complexity).

At some point, I should also get over my embarrassment, and open source the code.

(inspired by a wise Mastodon thread)

It made me think that a lot of people’s real hobby is gatekeeping, but they apply it to different avocations.

Way back in the ’90s I was a member of a photography club. Each month, there would be a competition among members. Pictures were scored from 1-5 on each of three criteria, which were something like technical expertise, aesthetics, and realization of the month’s theme. Everything was highly formalized with rules. Entries could only be recent slides, must comply with very specific labelling requirements, and so on, but the rules didn’t end there. Interpretation of the theme had to be extremely literal. I was lectured about frivolity on more than one occasion when using the theme metaphorically.

In the technical category, there were also a lot of absolutes. Visible grain in an image at normal magnification was an immediate disqualification. Technical points were deducted if there was anything remotely out of focus. Portraits which were allowed to have bokeh — but only if you couldn’t determine how many blades the lens diaphragm had. Furthermore, it was considered a technical flaw to have a portrait where the subject’s nose broke the outline of their face or had more than one reflected light visible in each eye. It wasn’t considered good form to mention make of the camera during the competition itself, but everybody knew who shot Leicas or had Zeiss lenses on their Nikons, and this influenced technical scores accordingly.

But beyond these kinds of rules, one of the old-timers had developed a set of “aesthetic guidelines” which were ruthlessly applied (in retrospect, these may have been born of some form of OCD). Two points would be subtracted from any image’s aesthetic score if there was water breaking the bottom of the frame “because that’s bad composition.” Any image that was brighter near the bottom than the top lost points. Landscapes that were not black and white had to have a person or a horse visible “to create interest.” Pictures of urban or industrial scenes had to be taken in hard daylight, while pictures of nature would lose points for not being taken at the Golden Hour. Pictures of people had to have an even number of eyes visible. Lines always had to lead into the image and never out.

I remember on one occasion, two of the judges arguing about a picture’s aesthetic qualities and one finally taking out a tape measure to confirm that the eye of a seabird was not exactly 33% from two edges of the frame. He triumphantly reduced the picture’s score for violating the “rule of thirds.”

I tried to participate on their terms for a lot longer than I should have. I was routinely chastised for not taking photography seriously because I didn’t study up on the rules. Needless to say, I eventually quit. I’d lost a lot of enthusiasm for photography, and it took a long time to get excited about it again.

I see this as a common thing in “typical guy hobbies” be they photography, cars, phones, motorcycles, programming languages, computers, guitars, knives, operating systems, guns, bicycles, or gaming systems. It often manifests as confusing the gear with the hobby, but also devolves into arguments about X being better than Y. It turns out that arguing in-group / out-group status is more interesting for a lot of folks than the hobby they’re ostensibly enjoying.

“Forget that stuff,” I yell (trying to convince myself and everyone else). Go out and do the thing, use what you’ve got, and enjoy it. That’s the real point, after all.

A window frame like this is a good way to test lens distortion and/or your post-processing workflow. As much as I hate it, Adobe Lightroom did a reasonably good job compensating for the lens distortion.

1/1000sec at f/8. Nikon D780, VR 28-300 f/3.5-5.6G at 82mm.

I have always had a strangely strong relationship to places. It’s difficult to verbalize, but having a deep familiarity with a locale has been a fundamental way I relate to the world. This extends into mapping fantastic places I’ve read about upon the physical world.

For example, when I spent some summer months of my tweens on the Gulf Islands near Vancouver, the archipelago became Earthsea in my mind. Around that same timeframe, I lived near Altadena. When I “discovered” Tolkien’s works, Middle-earth started imprinting upon the local terrain.

The San Gabriel mountains formed an excellent stand-in for the Misty Mountains. In winter, the clouds sit on the peaks, in Spring, the “June Gloom” does the same, and in the summer, the mountains were nearly hidden by the swirling smog of the late 70s.

The area is filled with places that mapped across those worlds. There’s a windy road above a tributary to the Arroyo Seco that goes through forests of oak and deodar, and in the early evening when the sky grows dark the lights in the windows of houses on the lower slope twinkle mysteriously. It was exactly what Rivendell looked like in my mind’s eye.

As I’d read, local places would overlay. The craggy entrance to Colby Canyon with its guardian trees, the steep drop-off ridges around Mount San Gabriel, the rough-hewn tunnel just down the trail at Eaton Saddle, the rustic cabins among the bright streams and white alder groves in Sturtevant Canyon, the high forested ridges above Ice-House Canyon — all mapped to places within the Lord of the Rings for me.

Decades later, when the blockbuster movies came out, I opted not to see them. The images in my head and the mappings to places I know were too important to be overwritten by Peter Jackon’s vision.

(Disclaimer: this photo has been digitally altered beyond just adjusting color and exposure. I removed telephone poles, a power pylon, and a lot of wires.)