Trippy Introduction

Submitted by Jesper on September 18, 2008 - 03:46
Topics: 
kde
qt
trippy

One one of the neat perks of Nokia aquiring Trolltech was that we all got cool new phones. Most chose the neato n95, which is effectively a camera with calling functionality. It takes great quality pictures, and thanks to its internal GPS, is able to geo-tag the photos with the coordinates of where it was taken. The question then of course is what will you do with all these photos and their metadata? A couple of KDE apps make it possible to view a selected photo on a map, but I wanted more. Enter Trippy!

Trippy uses Marble and Exiv2 to grab the GPS coordinates and timestamps from photos, and then pinpoint them on a map, drawing lines to "connect" the photos. The currently selected photo/route shows up as a red dot/line. The result is minimalistic application that focuses on just loading a directory of photos, and getting an overview of your journey and easily viewing the memories from it.

Currently it's hosted on Github:
http://github.com/jesper/trippy/tree/master

Usecase? Here's how my summer vacation looked:

Enjoy, and don't hesitate to fork on Github! ;)

Comments

Srikanth (not verified) - September 18, 2008 - 05:39

Wow, this is absolutely fantastic. I hope Gwenview and Digikam guys pick this up. A few more things to add to this that popped in my mind are:
1. Ability to add more points in the route even if I don't have photos.
2. Sync up with the route information available in marble so that instead of straight lines, it shows road ways or train or whatever (ofcourse, it should be configurable per segment)
3. Ability to take screenshots of the map and automatically upload to a blog with links to each photo present/uploaded to any of online photo sharing sites. Just make a journal/diary of all the trips
4. Ability to add photos by others found online, wikipedia or lonely planet links to the spots with photos as well as new nodes added with the point 1 above.

OK I will stop now. But this absolutely amazing. thank you.

-Srikanth

Ian (not verified) - September 18, 2008 - 05:50

I've wanted to do this sort of thing. I'm getting my N810 tomorrow hopefully, I'll try rigging it up with that (though I suspect one of those cheap dedicated GPS loggers would be better, long battery life). Regardless I might sometime take you up on your fork offer and add features for GPS/cameras that aren't on the same device (using dates to do the matching).

Jesper - September 19, 2008 - 19:32

Hey! Try looking into "gpscorrelate". I think its got what youre looking for :)

maniacmusician (not verified) - September 18, 2008 - 06:36

Hey,

How about adding visible and good looking chronological/spatial indicators such as arrows along the connecting lines? The quantity and size of such indicators could be calculated relative to the pixel-size of the map widget and zoom level (with indicators outside the zoom level being painted off screen, etc).

You could also implement a temporal indicator using color coding of the different lines, with a configurable and auto-adjusting legend. The legend configuration could have a linear gradient with possibly multiple color inputs (say red and blue, or more if the user chooses). Then, depending on the number of series added by the user, Trippy would choose appropriately plotted colors to show on the legend, which could then indicate colors respective to configurable time frames (last six months, last year, last 3 years, etc) --- perhaps you could even design a "temporal zoom" that would allow you to smoothly zoom in and out of time frames.

Hovering over a line could show the dates between which the series of pictures were taken, and hovering over a certain location could have various descriptive details, and perhaps a thumbnail slideshow using fade animations.

Are there any plans to integrate this into Digikam? I know they were messing around with geotagging as well, and this seems like a useful and innovative to implement that.

Sorry if anything I wrote is already there -- I don't have a current version of KDE on which to build this. Also, it's just constructive feedback, what you've done already is great. I figure since I can't code to save my life, tossing around some new ideas to maybe inspire someone couldn't hurt.

Anonymous (not verified) - September 18, 2008 - 17:45

You could use the FacetZoom widget to do that: http://advancingusability.wordpress.com/2008/03/31/facetzoom-first-open-...

Jesper - September 19, 2008 - 19:30

Interesting! Ill check that out / thanks!

Simon (not verified) - September 18, 2008 - 07:02

Great idea :)

Inge Wallin (not verified) - September 18, 2008 - 08:07

Hi, Inge here, one of the Marble maintainers...

Just wanted to give you a thumbs up for the nice integration of our widget and ask you about your experiences. Was it easy? Was the API sufficient? Did you miss anything? What can we do to make it even easier for you to use Marble?

-Inge

Jesper - September 19, 2008 - 19:29

Thanks! I've got a small list of things ... I'll clean it up a bit, then most it to the mailing list, or just email it directly to you. But in general, the marble widget was simply amazing :)

cd (not verified) - September 18, 2008 - 19:16

what's that window decoration you're using?

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