Mapping your Photos

With such a large influx of photos currently, I thought it would be worth running through the best way of mapping them all so they can be correctly organised into country galleries.

The process I would recommend is as follows.

1. Click on the 'Map' item in the main navigation
2. Click on "Photos". (or just use this link to take you straight there). You should now see a list of thumbnails on the left hand side of a world map. They are sorted by the date they were taken (as far as that could be worked out when importing)
3. Click on the link to "Hide mapped photos". You should now only see those photos without a location.
4. Click on the photos that are in the same location as each other . You should be able to shift-click or ctrl-click photos to select more than one. You will now see an info window appear on the right of the map.
5. Click on the "edit placement" link.
6. Type in an address, city name or even just a country name. More specific is better but it's not required.
7. If the right one appears, click on it. You should now see a star icon appear on the map to show where it's mapped to. (noteworthy: the name shown in the input field might change at this point - the reason for this is a bit obscure, but you should just leave whatever it named it as.)
8. If you want to adjust the location to be more precise, you can drag the marker on the map to the exact location as well.
9. Hit save. All photos that were selected will now have a tick next to them to indicate they are mapped. To make them disappear, you would have to click to "Show mapped photos" and then "Hide mapped photos" again. They don't just disappear from view.

Also, for anyone who might have tried this method over the past few days and run into issues - I've just been spending time working through that area in particular and fixed several bugs that made it problematic. It should work quite smoothly now.

Thanks for this Peter. I can see I'll be busy when I get home but at least this will speed things up a lot. If we opt not to map a photo does it remain invisible to others or is it still in our gallery if anyone takes the trouble to browse? Also, if at a later date I'm writing a blog entry, is it easy to filter my photos to see only those in the relevant location so I can quickly choose which to include?

Thanks Peter for this update i will try and map one location this weekend when i have more time and see how it goes, but it looks simple enough to do.

Quoting ToonSarah

If we opt not to map a photo does it remain invisible to others or is it still in our gallery if anyone takes the trouble to browse?

The photos will still be publicly visible in your gallery either way. Just harder to find.

Also, if at a later date I'm writing a blog entry, is it easy to filter my photos to see only those in the relevant location so I can quickly choose which to include?

Yes! When inserting a photo into a blog entry you can filter your photo list by either tag or country to narrow down the options. So doing this will ensure you can filter by country.

Quoting Peter

When inserting a photo into a blog entry you can filter your photo list by either tag or country to narrow down the options. So doing this will ensure you can filter by country.

Do I understand correctly that filtering can only be done by country, not by city/location? In other words, it makes sense to add the name of the place among the tags (hint to the others). I have 3,000 Germany photos... speaking of "easier to find".

I have developed another method to do this, including tags which, if I understand correctly, cannot be edited via the map. I use the photo list under "Manage", and the Windows search (CTRL + F) for a placename. All photo titles with the placename in description or file name will then be marked in yellow, so the photos can easily be found, ticked, and edited in bulk.
It is worth looking at the neighbouring ones in the list, too, as well as trying a typical keyword for the city, as the placename has not been transferred for all pictures.

Completing this task for 240 locations and 19,000 photos will still take a while, but I'll work on it step by step. (Another hint for the ex-VTers, in particular those with a large numebr of pages: Copy the list on your VT travel map into a Word file or similar and print it out, in order to have an alphabetical list of your pages/locations in hand to tick off or scribble notes on.)

I understand that Travellerspoint's system has never been designed for such an invasion, and that we newcomers have to do our part to make it work!!!!

Thank you so much Peter - I really love (= adore) this mapping of our photos!!!

Ha, again: the heart as emoticon is missed

[ Edit: Edited on 24-Feb-2017, at 02:13 by Trekki ]

Thanks for the instructions! This will take some time...

I noticed that when I try and map photos from certain places, the search recognises the location, but the map doesn't and takes me to some place in the middle of the Atlantic. I've been having this issue with Abkhazia and Kosovo, so maybe because they are not fully recognised regions, they can't be found on the map? For Abkhazia, I'm having to search for a nearby Russian or Georgian town, then zoom out and drag the photos into Abkhazia...it's a lot more time consuming than photos for other locations.

Hi Maykal, thanks for alerting me to that. It was a bug and a relatively easily fixed one. Try it again and it should work for you now

Thanks, that works perfectly now!

Using this method, is there any way to put in tags on the photos?