Anyone who has read a few entries on this site will know that I am keen on maps and navigation. My brain is good at spatial thinking and I’m generally good at remembering where things happened in a geographic sense. I also have fifteen years’ worth of photos saved on my computers that I never know what to do with. So I got to wondering if there was a way to organize the pictures spatially on a map in the same way my brain likes to remember things. There are probably apps that can do this, but I didn’t want to be locked into a platform or have all my photo history uploaded to the servers of some tech company. After some research, I found a working solution that gave me a fun little project over the holidays.

The most time-consuming part of this project was localizing and geotagging all my pictures. I accomplished this using a combination of Google Maps (right-click anywhere to get the coordinates of a location on the map) and a piece of free software called Geosetter which allows you to update the metadata attached to a photo. For the map portion, I installed an open-source GIS application called QGIS. It has an active user base online, and I used a plugin called QuickMapServices to get a global basemap, and another called ImportPhotos which conveniently shows a pin on the map at the location of an uploaded photo and displays the picture when you hover over it. It took a bit of trial and error, but in the end was fairly easy to create a map which actually does quite a nice job capturing my personal history in a way my brain can absorb it.