I am still trying the quirks of mapping on OSM by means of taking photos of interests using my smartphone and tablet with geotagging enabled.
Today I went on mapping the stretch of Lilac Street in Marikina, which is fast becoming a “Restaurant Alley” for more and more restaurants are plopping up on this street in the past years.
The restaurants there had not been mapped before to OSM.
Just what I am concerned, it seems that in some cases the GPS data saved on each of my photos are not accurate enough, with error up to 50 meters. Sometimes I had to use my reckoning in an attempt to plop points in the map correctly. I still haven’t installed yet any OSM editors on my smartphone, and I am too reluctant to edit OSM data on-the-spot, given how bad is theft situation in the Philippines. Imagine busy mapping a Manila alleyway when someone suddenly grabs your phone.
I am using a Korean variant of Samsung Galaxy SIII. Priming up geotagging in my device takes a minute or so, and I realized this halfway through my mission. I also have minor accuracy issues on the GPS of my smartphone; I am noticing some discrepancies of up to 20 meters when I reviewed my cycling track on a route-plotting map on my phone.
I may still well experiment with this method and refine it if needed. Aside from the security concerns which i mentioned above, currently, the best OSM editors on the market still have bugs on offline editing, so I am reluctant on using those apps. I may well have to refine my current method and use my computer in mapping based on the geotags of the photos which I took.
Discussion
Comment from SimonPoole on 7 June 2015 at 20:58
I would recommend to use either OpenCamera as the camera app (records the orientation of the device and has a setting to only take photographs when the device has a GPS fix) or use Mapillary.
While it is true that you will typically not get the best position accuracy by taking out the device waiting for a fix and pocketing it again, the trick is to capture enough context that you can use aerial imagery too to identify exactly where the relevant object is. For example if you are taking a picture of a shop, take a picture of the whole building too so that you can identify it from the roof shape etc.
Simon
Comment from H@mlet on 7 June 2015 at 21:54
Hello,
You could use OSMTracker or OsmAnd to record your track while you walk, even in your pocket. Thus when you take a photo, the GPS fix is already done.
My 2c Regards
Comment from santamariense on 7 June 2015 at 23:33
I use the android App OSMPad + a audio recorder. With the OSMPad I get the house number and with the audio recorder I describe all about a building: colour, levels, flats, shops and much more.
Comment from maning on 8 June 2015 at 01:44
Hey! Really glad another Marikina mapper here! For photomapping, I suggest you also look at mapillary. Lately, I’ve been uploading my Marikina photos in mapillary: http://www.mapillary.com/profile/maning
Interested to meet sometime?
Comment from BlueTiger on 9 June 2015 at 18:04
If you have corresponding GPX tracks, you may be able to get the coordinates of the places from where you have taken the photos using JOSM.
Open the gpx track in JOSM, right click on the gpx track in the layers, select import images.Once you select the images, follow the on-screen instructions and JOSM will mark the locations of the photos.
Comment from maxim1975 on 10 June 2015 at 01:29
For Linux users there is gpscorrelate and gpscorrelate-gui utility to add geotag to photos using GPX track
http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/hardy/man1/gpscorrelate.1.html https://apps.ubuntu.com/cat/applications/precise/gpscorrelate-gui/
In case your camera clock is not in sync with exact time you can also change EXIF date using exiftool
add 6 seconds to EXIF datetime
exiftool “-AllDates+=0:00:00 00:00:06” -overwrite_original_in_place -verbose G0015395.JPG
Comment from maxim1975 on 10 June 2015 at 01:34
Also check https://geolocation.ws/
It allows you to upload geotagged photos & GPX tracks. Also shows geotagged photos from multiple sources
http://i.imgur.com/eX3Y8ob.png