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yet another Microsoft blogger

# Wednesday, August 03, 2005

My Virtual Earth Hack

I was socializing this idea on the train ride home today. I’ve long had this application called JpegHammer that is mainly a showcase for a PhotoLibrary component that I wrote and was thinking of a cool way to integrate it with Virtual Earth to add GPS coordinates to photos (as well as view them).

My main motivation in writing PhotoLibrary was to have access to a Strongly Typed set of EXIF properties in JPEGs etc. Till a few days ago I had no reason to support GPS data cause there was no good way to get them into the photo. Well now with Virtual Earth and inspiration from Nikhilks’s Photo Map I decided it was high time to read EXIF GPS data and see if I could make my own Virtual Earth Hack (with help from viavirtualearth).

Right now all I do is located a selected photo that already has GPS data on a map using VE. The hardest parts were converting from Sexagesimal to decimal for Long/Lat, finding an HTML control (thanks again Nikhilk) that I could use in my WinForms app to render VE, and finding a sample jpg photo that contained GPS coordinates.

Next step is to allow you to browse the globe, and set the GPS location for a photo based on map data from VE, and save that in the JPEG (and eventually XMP) file. This is cool.

JpegHammerVEPrototype

 

Thursday, August 04, 2005 4:57:57 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
Just out of curiosity Omar, why does your screen showing the United Kingdom not have Wales on it, or has your map decided to flood it?
Travis
Thursday, August 04, 2005 5:00:03 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
Or of course being the logical explanation, the map is just showing an area of the UK that is higher than Wales. He He He.
Travis
Thursday, August 04, 2005 8:48:23 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
Omar, have you taken a look at the tools made available at http://wwmx.org?
Thursday, August 04, 2005 8:53:21 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
Also, why are you saving the GPS data to XMP? Why not to the Exif itself (EXIF has support for lat/lon coordinates).
Thursday, August 04, 2005 9:58:42 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
XMP for RAW images from my Nikon. You can't write EXIF data to any RAW files today.
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