By Marc Bijl on

Hi,

I'm starting a photo blog and I would like to have geo/location data in:

- The images (iptc)
- The drupal database
- The meta tags (geourl?)
- The node presentation (body)

Reasons:

- For search engine optimization
- For displaying additional information of an image
- For using the same images for all my needs (including stock photo sites)
- For (future) integration with web applications (like "Google Map based applications")

Therefore, in my current workflow (I think) I need to manually add geo/location data a few times:

- Add to image as iptc data, by using Geosetter (and Adobe Lightroom)
- Add to drupal db as geo/location data, by using location module
- Add to meta tags as global geourl, by using meta tags module
- Add to node as table data, by pasting data in the body field *

* For this last step I need a few sub steps:

1. Export iptc geo/location data from image to .txt by using a Lightroom export plugin
2. Copy and paste the data from the .txt file into a worksheet, by using Microsoft Excel
3. Copy and paste the data from the sheet in very specific html tables, by using Dreamweaver
4. Copy and paste the code of the html template into the node body, by using... Drupal! ;)

I guess this is not the best workflow possible :\
So all recommendations are welcome :D

Does anyone with a photo blog already have a complete workflow, which (easily) makes use of the same data over and over again?

Currently I'm using meta tag module and location module. I know CCK & View module can be helpful. And there might be some other related modules.
But I'm still looking for optimal integration...

Thnx,
Marc

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

Marc Bijl’s picture

Marc Bijl commented

Hmm, to be more specific, with geo/location data I mean:

- Standard coordinates (lattitude, longitude)
- Flickr coordinates (or how do we call them?)
- Location, street, city, province, country, etc

___________________
discover new oceans
lose sight of the shore

budgetstockphoto’s picture

budgetstockphoto commented

Some Related Thoughts:

The exif module will read image description and copyright info, it will also i think read geo information, but like you added in your comment i'm not exactly certain what format that is in when read, probably just text so its up to you.

exif module is quite different between D5 and D6, in D6 the exif module allows the population of CCK fields using something a bit like tokens, but i don't think these can be used to populate location fields of a content type(?), just display in their own fields.

The Integrated Metatags module can take cck fields (your description, location etc) and stick them into the html description tag

I currently use this little lot on a site which takes bulk uploads of jpegs (image import), it strips the iptc description out and displays it on the node, the node title is made up of the file name with some text appended. The limitations I can't find a way round at present is that exif module will not read the 'title' or 'keywords' data (these are iptc which i think extends from exif?) I would dearly love to get the keywords from each image and get them into a cck field

I too would like at some point to automatically read location info and if its present, either a lattitude/long or the name of a city etc then include a link to a map / mash it into the location module

so far ive drawn a blank on that, triggers/workflow/tokens???? or some php in the cck fields

WorldFallz’s picture

WorldFallz commented

I know nothing of the exif module, but if as you say it stores the location info in fields, I would think you could use the http://drupal.org/project/rules module to copy that info into the location module fields for use with location/gmap.

Another option might be to skip location module alltogether and see if one of the map modules allows for specifying which fields contain the location data. http://drupal.org/project/mapstraction looks like it might work, but i've never tried it.

mrwendell’s picture

mrwendell commented

Are your photos Geocoded (i.e. lat/long)?
Are your photos each a node, or are you treating images as second class citizens?

The reason I ask is I have been writing a custom module for my own cycling photo blog, which has photos as a type of node.

My custom module acks a "glue" to leverage other modules. Currently, It hooks into the presave state for my photo/image nodes, so that it can parse the IPTC and EXIF data from the image file and fill in the appropriate node fields. Lat/lon goes to the location module's lat and long fields. If I have location data in the IPTC (e.g. city, country, etc) I put that in the correct location module fields. Lacking that I reverse geocode the lat/lon using googles API, get the city, country, etc and fill in the location module fields. Finally, the module puts in the title and body from the IPTC Object name and Captions respectively if either are empty.

Therefore my photo workflow goes like this

1) Import photos to Apple Aperture (I used to use lightroom but didn't like its lack of organization abilities),
2) geocode the photos using a GPS track I save on a photo shoot (Ubermind make a plugin to do this nicely in Aperture).
3) Fill in the objectname and caption (this will be my photo node title and body)
4) Import the photos to my Drupal site directly from Aperture, using the Gallery API (image_pub module) module for drupal and the Gallery plugin for Aperture.

This is on my test site, so I can't share the URL.

Since image node is being devalued I will have to modify this solution for cck + imagefield based image nodes. As such, Step 4 would then be upload via FTP to a folder on the server. Import images into drupal via the imagefield_import module.

Is this the kind of solution you are thinking of?

Note once you have the data in fields, you can display it however you want via the theme layer.