OffSetLab

This is the third post in the series about developing a script that uses your photos to create a workable KML that shows where the photos were taken on Google Earth. The first one talked about the script basics and the second one introduced reverse geocoding.

The generated KML still has a problem that the name of the photo is just a file path for it.

I wanted to rectify that since it looks ugly on Google Earth. To do that, I needed to know what was in each image. The process where you have half a thousand photos and need to rename them properly can be tedious. A Machine Learning algorithm is better suited for the task. The solution is called image classification and in the case I'm going to describe, it uses convolutional neural network on a pre-trained dataset from ImageNet to make things simple. In the background it does operations on an array of values to figure out what's in an image, which is an array of pixels in itself. Brandon Rohrer explains how convolutional neural networks work if you want to learn more about it.

I attended an information science university. Parts of my curriculum were focused on machine learning so the things that today's industry considers hot are pretty much more of the same, just with more resources.

Now, I cannot have what Google has at its disposal in terms of the dataset and I don't want the script to be overly complex for an ordinary user to use. The usual process is making a tagged dataset to train your model, but I wanted to have a pre-trained model so people didn't need to think about it, there was no need for fine tuning and they could get it out quick and dirty. Fortunately, there's a way today.

Enter Keras. Keras is a machine learning library written in Python. It uses several back-ends, but by default it relies on Google's own TensorFlow library. Installation is simple as it just relies on installing the tensorflow and keras libraries on your system:

pip install tensorflow keras

You don't have to do this because it's covered in the script requirements. Chances are it will work out of the box, and that's what I'm aiming for, but if you want to leverage your hardware resources, introduce GPU support if you have an Nvidia card, or Intel optimization for TensorFlow on Linux systems. You can check out the instructions for installing those yourself. What it usually involves is installing the tensorflow-gpu package or wheels with pip from Intel themselves. The instructions go beyond the scope of this article, which simply aims to provide the means for quick tagging of photos where the speed is not that critical and the user usually has modest resource capabilities.

Keras already has an access to the pre-trained models and the first time you're running an evaluation on the image, it downloads the model and puts it in a hidden keras directory in your home. This script uses ResNet50 application, whose model is around 100 MB and is trained on the ImageNet dataset.

When it classifies each image, the results are displayed as a certainty estimate and a guess from the algorithm, ordered from the best to worst. What happens then is that the first two estimates are taken together and separated by a "/" character. This is what ends up as the name on the placemark.

For the moment I am happy with the resulting script. Reverse geocoding and machine learning have shaped it up nicely.

The image classification results are not going to be perfect, but it should definitely save you quite a lot of time having the image names prepopulated with terms. You can then error correct manually those that you don't find accurate if you want.

Implementing the ResNet50 Keras application was very simple in the end and is good enough without fine-tuning.

Then again... The categories could be automatically translated as well. So I included TextBlob and powered up the automatic translation. You just run:

python geotag-gallery.py --folder=/absolute/path/to/the/image/folder/ --language=hr

The language parameter is optional. It will default to English if you don't put in anything.

Beware, though. TextBlob is not a robust solution since it's using a public facing 3rd party API and you might experience HTTP error 503 depending on Google's whims so you might be better off not using that feature since it's not guaranteed to work and is experimental at best.

So there you have it. Like I said before, you can download it from the repository. Pull requests are always welcome.

A while ago I made a Python script that takes your images and extracts the latitude and longitude coordinates for KML from them. The KML can then be opened with Google Earth where you can enjoy the fancy display of your photos attached to map locations. The script works in the way that it creates placemarks in KML that are correctly placed on the map. When one clicks the placemark, it opens a popup with the image associated with that location.

However, the description is just a timestamp of when an image was taken. That bugged me and there was a better way to get the information about the location, too. The format I opted for was "Photographed at {timestamp} near {location_description}". Quite better than just "{timestamp}".

Since I already had the timestamp to work with, that part was easy, but the other one, where I needed to figure out the location was a bit more tricky. I relied on a public openstreetmap reverse geocoding API to get the information about the specific coordinates. To comply with their terms of service, I needed to avoid bulk querying and query the service only once per second. I also needed to keep a cache of locations so the repeated coordinates didn't need to query the service.

The algorithm in question is simple enough. To get that, first check the cache if it has the location already and return that. If not, pause for two seconds because I don't want to take any chances and then query the service with the requests library, cache the response and get the location description. The requests naively retries for a couple of times just to be sure and drops it if it times out.

The result is a bit more easy to comprehend.

Now, the name that gets into the title also bugs me, but I'll explain the fix I did in the next post.

I decided to write a Python script that would create a Google Earth KML file with the list of geotagged photos that can be showed in the application. My reasoning for it was that a while ago Google decided to shut down Panoramio, the service they had acquired previously.

The service was of a photo-sharing type; much like Google Photos or Flickr today. The added ability that set the service apart from others was that the Google Earth application had a map layer comprised of photos stored on Panoramio. With Panoramio gone, the layer from Google Earth was removed as well.

I was not a user of it, but I liked looking at photos on Google Earth, thinking of places I wanted to visit. I wanted to share where I was traveling with my friends and family. Of course, provided that they used the same set of tools.

To achieve this the media needs to be enriched with geolocation information. The practice itself is called geotagging. JPEG image format, common with a number of digital cameras, can have metadata added to it (in contrast to PNG for example). The specific metadata is called EXIF and can contain information like the timestamp when the image was taken, camera type, location, etc. All the information necessary to create a KML file that Google Earth can read.

Now, before I get into the details about the Python script, I want to point out that EXIF information has a number of privacy and security issues. A number of TLA agencies are targeting EXIF information and using it for their purposes. For example, thanks to Edward Snowden's whistleblowing, we know that the NSA is targeting EXIF tags.

A number of examples associated with geotagging concerns are presented by Friedland and Sommer. A burglar can track your geotagged information and find out where you live, when you're not at home and steal things from your house.

Social networks make it incredibly easy to collect information on you and distribute it among unwanted people. One should be careful about the use of it, especially with kids nowadays gaining access and doing things they don't understand, enabling predators to exploit the information.

In your travels, you might visit wilderness and snap some photos that you would post online. One of more curious examples of abuse is poachers looking for rare animal photo geotags to figure out where to go. You want to be careful and think twice before you share information in this manner. Your camera or smartphone may be using GPS technology to attach the coordinates to an image.

Having said all that, you might think that EXIF information is not for you or that you want to strip that information before posting it online. It can be done, both stripping the EXIF information and preventing it from being saved in the first place.

I store my photos locally on an external disk and look at them offline. I don't frequent social networks so I don't have much trouble with geotagging information. I wanted to see where and when I was for personal use. That's why I created the Python script mentioned in the beginning of the article. You are free to use it too.

The necessary information I got was mostly from the article showing how to create placemarks for use in Google Earth. I wanted to automate the process and save KML instead. I could do that with Python.

The resulting script works only for Python 2.7.x for now because the PyKML dependency is not Python 3 ready so make sure you have the latest Python 2.7.x installed on your system. I install the dependencies in the virtual environment with virtualenvwrapper and can run it without trouble, but you might want to install them differently. Anyway, they are provided in the requirements.txt file in the repo. You can sift through the README.rst file there for more information. The usage of the script is pretty straightforward and it goes something like this::

$ python geotag-gallery.py --folder=/path/to/folder/with/geotagged/images

Keep in mind that it will parse the folder and the nested folders located in it. I use WSL on Windows to point it there or Linux locally so I can find my way around. It is supposed to work on both. The result of the script processing is the KML file in the specified folder with relative path to the images so you're not supposed to move it from there. You can open the KML with Google Earth and see where the images were taken according to the provided coordinates.

It also takes the timestamp so you can replay your steps and see when you were taking the photos.

I hope you find it useful or that it gives you an idea for a more comprehensive system you might want to work on. The script is on the BitBucket repository and under the GPL license so you can do whatever you want with it provided you share the code and give credit where it's due. Without further ado, you can download the Python script for creating KML from geotagged images in the mentioned repo. I put the download information deliberately at the end because I want people to know what they are doing and read through the article first.

This is a GreaseMonkey script that looks up your favorite subs on Reddit and colorizes the posts from them on your home page.

It turns something like this:

To something like this:

The prerequisite is a browser that supports installing the script. I use Firefox and the GreaseMonkey extension, but it should work on others, too. For instance, TamperMonkey on Chrome.

You can get it on Gist under Reddit favorites coloring. Just click "raw" button there and the browser extension should prompt you to install it.

Become a blood donor. That's the gist of it. I'll tell you a bit about that. I've been trying to write this post for a very long time now. I've been to the donor clinic about four times already in the past two years. It was always something preventing me from donating. Either me not being originally from this country, having to give samples first, or having to wait because I had been traveling, or having to get some medical documentation they needed to verify first. Right now, after my first proper donation, things are finally falling into place. Vesna and I were persistent, if nothing.

Donating blood is not something that was strongly encouraged in our lives. I know that some high-schools did it. I don't think my class did. It was a chance for students to skip a school-day. If you're employed, depending on the country you are located in and your employer, you might get a paid day off, or there might be other incentives. Not in Ireland, though, but it's not something I was looking for. I'm donating because it's the right thing to do and that should be a proper motivation for others as well.

There are people who oppose it out of an overall hidden fear that doing it might lead to complications, that the procedure can cause an infection in the donor's organism, but that fear is largely unfounded. Every kit used for the donation is brand new and safety procedures are strictly adhered to.

While the best thing is to avoid unnecessary transfusion, we are no strangers to receiving it when the need arises. Blood transfusion is used as a support during surgeries and often for children and people over 65. According to the WHO, up to 76% of blood transfusions is for the people over 65. We might as well develop better life practices now and spread the word while we're young, because, when we get older, chances are we'll need a blood transfusion.

This goes hand in hand with the social sensitivity we should have. We might find ourselves in such a situation where blood donation could save our lives. As minuscule as that risk may be, the blood we receive must come from somewhere. In essence, we're all relying on the good will of some stranger and we can be that stranger to someone.

Carl Sagan said that we're all made of stars:

The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars.

We are inter-compatible in a way. Depending on the variables, we can share some of the body parts between us. Blood would be one of them.

The overall process of donating is easy. Nowadays, there's a questionnaire mostly comprised of questions about your past and current illnesses (if any), a quick check for iron levels in your blood, and soon after, if everything's OK, you donate blood (or a sample for starters). About 470ml is the norm. In Ireland, a donation can occur every 90 days. However, they will delay your donation date if you have exposed yourself to a risk of contracting something (the exposure criteria differs from country to country), or outright prohibit you. If you are green-lit for a donation, they will still test your blood for a number of things.

Aside from donating blood, there are other options as well:

• donating the platelets which is likely possible even if you're unable to donate blood. They are used for treating bleedings.
• donating the bone marrow. Mostly for treating leukemia patients and anyone in need of it.

Platelets are usually donated by filtering the blood for it and you have to have both arms connected to the machine. For the bone marrow, there are two ways of obtaining it. Either through direct removal from a hip bone, which requires you to stay in a hospital, or by receiving an injection with a medication that increases the production of stem cells. The stem cells get into your bloodstream and the highest concentration of them occurs a few days later. You are supposed to come in at that time and get your blood taken normally. They usually call you when there is a requirement, so you only get registered once and wait.

The ultimate thing you can do with your body in this respect is the organ donation. While you can give a kidney to someone while you're alive, most organ donations happen posthumously. Some countries implement this as part of an inclusive policy, where one must formally opt-out. That is a good approach in my opinion. If you happen to live in a country where you must opt-in, you can do so if you wish. A transplanted organ can save a life.

I hope I convinced you to make a difference. The procedure for blood donation is not that big of a deal and you get a small free health check-up. You can already start planning today.