GPSeitor for my Lumix DMC-ZS7

Last year I got the chance to work onsite for two months at WDW, Orlando. Since I had a chance to get some cheap technology (in Argentina imported gadgets and technology in general tend to cost around twice as much because of tax) it was the perfect chance to get a camera.

I am far from being a savvy photographer, but I do like good-quality pictures. One reason is that I have a poor memory and I  tend to rely a good amount of my memories to my picture archives (which is another reason of why I started this [b]log). And yet, many times I sit and see my precious moments faded by some lousy focus or ruined by pixelation.

Cutting to the chase, with a little technical assistance from my globant pals I got a Lumix DMC-ZS7. This is very close to a customizable DSLR as you can get with a point&shoot compact camera, which turned out to be just what I wanted. Light and small enough to get it everywhere even in your pocket, with a great leica lens, a good zoom, good picture quality and stereo HD video recording.

And the icing on the cake was... it has a GPS receiver for geo-tagging your photos, a great feature for documenting my trips, which is mostly when I use my camera.

So now I had this bunch of geo-tagged pictures, but ir resulted very annoying to have to upload them to picasa just for viewing them in a map. I finally got tired and put together a small tool that would allow me to display my pictures in a map in a gallery-like form. The result: GPSeitor (on github)

It's a python script that would scan a given directory for images, read their GPS Exif data and generate a static html gallery with all the images located in a google map allowing you to navigate through the pics and pop the pictures and pan the map when you click on them.

So far it's in an alpha state (I haven't even cleaned the code). It's usable (you can actually get the gallery above by just running ./gpseitor -d photoDirectory) but sort of limited. Although I am planning to add some more features anytime soon, this tool is only to spare me the annoyance of uploading the pics to picasa before I could see them in a map, and it's not supposed to grow much more than that.

I hope someone else finds it useful too.