Note: I've abandoned development on Yore. Using a webview for the GUI has made development too complicated, especially when it breaks in the webview but not in a browser and I can't debug why. I may decide to try a different approach, but I'll keep this around in case it has anything I'll want to reuse.
A cross-platform utility to help geotag JPEG photos using your Google Location History data.
Given a Google Location History JSON file and a directory, Yore can recursively scan the directory for images without GPS metadata and match their timestamps to location timestamps, optionally interpolating between data points or picking the point closest in time when an exact match doesn't exist.
Yore relies on Exiv2 to write GPS metadata.
To build Yore, install Rust and Node 8+ then run
npm install
npm run build
cargo build --release
to create release executables at target/release/yore and
target/release/yore-webview (yore.exe and yore-webview.exe on Windows).
Before using Yore, you need to export your Google Location History data as a JSON file.
Also ensure that you have Exiv2 installed and that its
executables are on your PATH or in the same directory as your yore and/or
yore-webview executable(s). You don't need Exiv2 installed if you aren't going
to apply any suggested locations.
Suggestions are made by finding the closest match to the photo's date taken timestamp in the location history data. The accuracy distance is as recorded by Google, and may not itself be particularly accurate. The accuracy time is the difference between the photo and location timestamps: negative values are when the suggested location timestamp is older than the photo timestamp.
Suggestions are not made for photos without date taken timestamps or photos which already have location metadata. In the latter case, the existing metadata will be displayed instead.
Just run yore-webview. Alternatively, you can set the initial values for the
photo and location history file paths and whether or not location suggestions
are interpolated, using command line parameters:
./yore-webview -i -l LocationHistory.json photos/
To get a suggested location for a single photo:
./yore -l LocationHistory.json photo.jpg
"photo.jpg":
Suggested location: (55.6382576, 12.6572722)
Suggestion accuracy: 6 metres, -3 seconds
View on map: <https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/55.6382576%2C12.6572722>
Save the suggested location to this image? (y/n)
To recursively scan a directory for photos and get suggested locations for them:
./yore -l LocationHistory.json photos/
"photos/folder1/photo1.jpg":
Suggested location: (55.6382576, 12.6572722)
Suggestion accuracy: 6 metres, -3 seconds
View on map: <https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/55.6382576%2C12.6572722>
Save the suggested location to this image? (y/n)
y
Location saved for folder1/photo1.jpg
"photos/folder2/photo2.jpg":
Suggested location: (55.638164, 12.6563669)
Suggestion accuracy: 21 metres, 1 minute, 59 seconds
View on map: <https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/55.638164%2C12.6563669>
Save the suggested location to this image? (y/n)
n
"photos/folder2/photo3.jpg":
Already has a location: (38.76544, -9.094802222222222)
To get location suggestions and skip prompts to save them:
./yore -r -l LocationHistory.json photos/
"photos/folder1/photo1.jpg":
Suggested location: (55.6382576, 12.6572722)
Suggestion accuracy: 6 metres, -3 seconds
View on map: <https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/55.6382576%2C12.6572722>
"photos/folder2/photo2.jpg":
Suggested location: (55.638164, 12.6563669)
Suggestion accuracy: 21 metres, 1 minute, 59 seconds
View on map: <https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/55.638164%2C12.6563669>
"photos/folder2/photo3.jpg":
Already has a location: (38.76544, -9.094802222222222)
The CLI can also be used to start a server for the GUI that can then be used via a web browser.
./yore -g -l LocationHistory.json photos/
Listening on http://127.0.0.1:8080
Once Yore is listening, open your web browser to the URL Yore is listening on, and you'll see Yore's GUI.
The port Yore listens on can be set using the -p CLI argument, and defaults to
8080. A value of 0 will bind the server to an ephemeral port. When running
the GUI server, the -r flag is ignored, and the location history and photo
path parameters are optional.
To enable interpolation, pass the -i flag when running Yore.
If interpolation is enabled and a photo's timestamp doesn't exactly match a location timestamp but is at a time between two location data points, the location will be calculated by assuming movement in a straight line at constant radial speed between the two points. The use of radial speed may make results less accurate when the two locations are at significantly different latitudes, but in such cases the result will be pretty inaccurate anyway.
With interpolation enabled the suggestion accuracy is calculated by linearly interpolating between the recorded accuracies of the two location data points and half the surface distance between the two locations. The accuracy starts at the value of the preceding location's accuracy, scales to the half-distance value at the mid-point between the two locations, and scales to the value of the following location's accuracy.
If the half-distance is less than either location's accuracy, it is ignored and the accuracy is linearly interpolated between the two location accuracies.