Just finished updating the Europe Cycle Tour, drawing the route that we took using GPX Draw and using a combination of the gpssave gallery2 module and also some perl scripting to position the photos in the right spots on the map.

Click here to have a look:

That was the last of the cycle tours to convert for Google Maps, it has been a challenging project, I have had to learn a couple of different API’s, programming languages and developing new modules for Gallery2 but I think it has all been worth it. I like how I can have a overview of all the tours and the cycling stats shown graphically.

After 2 weeks of wrestling with the Google Map API and Javascript I have an alpha version of GPX Draw. As mentioned in my previous posts I have been looking for a way of geocoding my travel photos but unfortunately I did not have a GPS unit with me while I was travelling but I did keep a day by day diary and the photos are all timestamped hence the idea that if I was able to draw a route of my travels with time information at each point then I will be able to estimate the location where the photo was taken by looking at the timestamp of the photo and relating it to the route information in a GPX file.

You can have a look at what I have so far by clicking on the “GPX Draw Google Map” tab in the header of this page or going to the following location:GPX Draw. The application is orientated towards cycle touring but could be modified for other purposes. This is a preliminary version, I havent done that much testing on it yet so if you find bugs then let me know.

One of the problems that wasted a lot of my time was the fact that firefox on the Mac platform does not send a keydown event when the CTRL or SHIFT buttons are pressed. Originally I wanted to have the application switch to ‘add marker’ mode if the user was holding down the SHIFT key, once the SHIFT key is released the application would go back to ‘add point’ mode. This is very nice for the user and I was very happy with the way it was working on the Linux box but when I tried it on the Mac I found that no keydown events were being generated. After much hacking around and searching for a solution on the web, I ended up having to add a set of radio buttons for switching between modes. As a user friendly measure I have added hot keys (a,z,d) for switching modes (note that the mac does generate keydown events for normal keys but not the modifier keys).

Other problems I had were with pop calendars, until I found the following The DHTML / JavaScript Calendar which is ultimate javascript calendar, plus is it free.

At this stage I am going to start drawing test routes and feeding the generated GPX into PhotoLinker along with the photos to be geocoded.

I have been diving into the Google Maps API for the last couple of days. After finding the nice Google map module for WordPress I started looking for a way of geocoding the photos that I took while travelling around the world on a bicycle.

One solution is to find the geocode for a photo by manually positioning it on a map, this would be very time consuming and tedious. The other solution is to use the time-stamp of the photograph (almost all digital camera write this into the EXIF data) and a track-log( which is a log kept by a GPS unit about where it was at what time) to calculate where the photo was take.

The good news is that most of my photos are timestamped, the bad news is that I didn’t have a GPS so I don’t have a track-log of where I went. But I did always draw on a map the route that I was taking and I kept a daily journal of the places I visited. So I did a search of the web for a program which would allow me to draw a track-log by hand then I could feed my photos and this track-log into some freely available photo-llinking program which would time-stamp the photos with the geocode.

I was amazed at the amount GPS stuff that is going on, there seems to be a revolution going on in that field, nevertheless I couldn’t find exactly what I was looking for so I decided to write my own Google Map application. It has been a steep learning curve but I am slowly getting there, here is a preliminary work-in-progress application as I start to build it up.

I have been wanting to do a photo travelogue web page of the cycling tours that I have gone on for the past 5 years for a long while now. It has been on the back of my mind, bubbling away and yesterday I ran into a Gallery2 Module which makes what I wanted to do so much easier. It is based around the Google Map API and lets you enter longitude and latitude coordinates for each photo, the photo is then marked on a Google Map and clicking on it brings up a thumbnail of the image.

There is also a way of creating routes on the map, which I find very interesting I want to take all the entries from my travel diary and build up the routes that I cycled around the world. Right now I have only a couple of photos on the map and no routes but I am searching for a quick way of finding the coordinates of a town or a village for easy addition. Also it would be nice to have notes giving the date, kilometers travelled that day and the average speed.

I have added a tab called “Cycle Tours” in the header of the site or you can go to the Photo Map section from this link.