Robogeo Geocoded images KML XSLT transformation

[cybarber]

Updated with an online Sample file Using DABU blogging tool I uploaded some 90 photo's which I took during a recent mountainbike trip in the south of the Netherlands. With the robogeo.xml geocoded-images input file, my PhotoTrack2KML.xslt sheet, I transformed the Garmin GPS60 - Mapsource - GPX track file to a KML file with weblinks for the icon and full size images. The transformation was done with my GPX KML GML robogeoXML XSLT converter.

Below Keyhole BBS forum message gives all the links and info.
http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/remlinker.php...amp;Main=132922

Brief explanation on Dabu blog
In below post in the same thread followingGE Images show how it looks like.

>>>>>Have been using Microsofts research WWMX proggie location stamper to match my track GPX timestamps with the Digital images timestamp to add GPS data to the JPG's EXIF info.

A disavantage of WWMX is that it canot export the images with there location stamped coordinats and elevation in an XML file. When making a trip of a few hours with over a hundred photo.s taken along the route is manually not feasable.

I found RoboGEO which does the job for you. You can drop a folder of images in the program together with your GPX track file. RoboGEO will then math/location stamp and make a caption on the images.
One can then export the whole lot in a Goolge Maps (you need to get a Google API key) ready folder. That folder contains an XML file with image names, lat, long, elevatin, time and image links.

To get this stuff easy into Google Earth instead of Google Maps I wrote an XSLT transformation sheet which transforms the RoboGEO.xml file into a GE KML file with the image es as Waypoints and all points as a path. (I am still working on an update of the transformation sheet to calculate for each waypoint a heading(for camera animation) ).

The result is fabulous.

SO the procedure is:

Download the track from your GPS(GPS 60 into Mapsource) export the GPS track as an GPX version 1.1 file.

Dowenload your images from the trip to a folder.

Open Robogeo, load the image folder and the GPXS track.
Do the stamping and captioning if desired.
Then Export from Robogeo to a Google Maps format. In that process you can set a title and description for each image.

Then transform the resulted RoboGEO.xml file with my style sheet and load the resulting file into Google Earth.

Robogeo photo file to KML stylesheet can be downloaded as of Agust 17th. PhotoTrack2KML.xslt application for RoboGEO input file transformation to KML is now online including Bearing, distance to next Waypoint and Slope degree calculations August 19th: added cumulative climbing meters from start to finish. August 20th: Updated path with icons August 22nd: added Elevation polygon profile of track. added Polygon Bounding box of track region. September 18th: added Elevation polygon Height lines.

Good Luck
William A Slabbekoorn aka Cybarber

[cybarber]

For those who missed it in another post:

I made two utility XSLT sheets to convert GPX between version 1.0 and 1.1:
Links to my
gpx10t011.xslt gpx v1.0 to v1.1
and to my
gpx11to10.xslt GPX v1.1 to 1.0 are active.

Hope to post this week also a small HTML application to do the transforms and save them locally.
I hope that also my gpx to kml and kml to gpx transformation sheets
will be ready then.

Cybarber

[cybarber]

How it looks like in GE:
Path with path photo waypoints(path points hidden), clicking a popup-image will open a larger version in browser.

The popup shows for each way point the Altitude (direct data from GPS), cumulative climbing meters(calculated), climbing meters to next waypoint(caculated for only accending, climbing meters), slope angle(calculated), distance to next waypoint (calulated with cosinus sum functions), and bearing to next waypoint(calculated). Part of the info is also shown in the snippet.

Part of the track (Huy near Liege in Belgium) with draw path and image waypoints

Path poins of track



Polygon Elevation graph of track(calculated X,Y axis) and top down view of tracks bounding box (minlon,minlat to maxlon, maxlat). The Graph and Box are placemarks and can be deselected (hidden from view)



Inside the bounding-box.
Looking at track bounding box and polygon elevation graph from a distance.


Cybarber

[PenguinOpus]

cybarber,

This is some very cool work! I wish I had some GPS/pictures of my own to try this with.

[Ivo_N]

I was wondering.. does it generalise routes exported to Google Maps ? I've noticed maps doesn't handle polylines with hundreds of points very well. These are no problem in Google Earth.

For my own maps i've put something together that will generalise the route and limit the polyline to say, 200, points . Next i'm looking for a way to bundle markers.

http://www.xs4all.nl/~ivonoorh/maps/umbrie_dag1.html

Cheers, Ivo

[cybarber]

How did you create the Google map pages?
Did you transform a GPX file with some program?
What is the problem with moore then 200 map points?
Is it your conversion proggie problem or isit Google maps which can't handle more then 200 points?

If you give a link to your GPX file it would be easy to make a KML transfomation using your online images.
If you put them online (the GPX files) and post a link here I can coock something up Tonight.

Groeten,
Cybarber

[cybarber]

Thanks,

I am working on an interface for easy transformation of any GPX file, but the whether was too good this Sunday in the Netherlands so that my home work for this week.

[Ivo_N]

> How did you create the Google map pages?

I've made two exporters for GeoMedia, a GIS application from Intergraph, one that can export a webpage using Google Maps and another that can export to KML. These exporters are more or less generic and not intended for just hiking trips or photographs.

I've imported the track in GeoMedia, generated a ployline from it, made an export of the image timestamps and names (with jhead) and joined these two tables on the time date stamp.

> Did you transform a GPX file with some program?

I exported the data from the Garmin Geko to CSV.

> What is the problem with moore then 200 map points?
> Is it your conversion proggie problem or isit Google maps which can't
> handle more then 200 points?

It's the webbrowsers that can't handle *lots* of points. The original track data had 1030 points, a naive export will create a polyline with 1030 points (that's 1030 "new GPoint( - , - )" statements in javascript). Internet Explorer will get slow but can handle this, Firefox for example will get very slow and show a waning message. I feel it's important to keep the webpages small en "portable".

The conversion program itself does not have any obvious limits. It also does coordinate transforms to WGS84.

The .kml exporter still needs some work, i'd like to show thubnails in the placemark. I'll include an example file.

[Ivo_N]

I'd like to propose an application that can :
* Import GPX
* Extract time & date stamps and file names from a directory.
* Place the photo's on the track, interpolating between trackpoints if needed.
* Generalise trackpoints.
* Export this data as .kml
* Export this as a maps page.

The application should be :
* Open Source. GPL or BSD for example.
* Cross platform.

The application could be XML based, generating XML base data and using XSTL for the transforms to .kml and .html

Most of the parts needed are freely available.

Anyone care to comment ?

[cybarber]

You KML file although valid XML is not appreciated by Google Earths ?internal? Xerces XML parser.

It has an empty xmlns in the Folder element (xmlns="") was gives an error.

And yes you could have used the images url as the HREF for the icon's like in my stylesheet.

Cybarber

[ss15]

Your RoboGeo to Google Earth transformation stylesheet looks incredibly useful. Unfortunately I'm pretty ignorant about how to use those things. I think I can generate the robogeo.xml file ok as the map works okay in Google Maps, but I don't know what to do next in terms of transforming it to a Google Earth KML file..

If I paste:
'<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="PhotoTrack2KML.xslt"?>'
in the beginning of my robogeo.xml file and load it in Firefox, I get an
'Error during XSLT transformation: An unknown XPath extension function was called.' error.

Am I on the right track?

Thanks,

Steve Spielman

[cybarber]

hi,

I'll do my best to post and interface soon.
The XSLT file is for MSXML4 (Internet Explorer)

Cybarber

[PhilRichards]

Zarbi, this is excellent. I had put off learning about XSLT until now, but now I see that it is too useful to ignore.

Thanks!

Phil

[cybarber]

Hello, yes things are EVOLVING with XML-XSLT.
Heard about Office 12 of Microsoft which again more and more using XML, XSLT Xquery etc.

Zarbi

[mysterich]

Hi...this sounds really cool....i've got robogeo -images, stamped exif stuff, exported the map and i've got your style sheet....just have absolutely no idea how to use it?
do i alter it with my current .xml output, upload it as is, etc.?

I'm a little confused...

[GeoGuy]

I recently added some documentation that explains one method for using cybarber's transform. You can find it at http://www.robogeo.com/home/export.asp.

Very soon I'll be releasing a RoboGEO upgrade that will export to GE, so if you want to wait on that...

Tim Helton

[cybarber]

If you download below txt file and rename it to .js(javascript) and then place it in the map with your robogeo.xml (with the stylesheet ofcourse) then you have your KML file in a few seconds.

robogeo2KML.txt

Cybarber

[cybarber]

Today, October 1st, I have added robogeo.xml to KML transformation to my draft Converter interface.

Besides being able transform (with the PhotoTrack2KML.xslt ) one can also
choose to transform KML to GPX, GPX10to 11 and vice-versa as well as
GML(Geographical Markup Language) to KML.
The online GUI:
http://members.home.nl/cybarber/geomatters/KmlGpxGmlTransform.hta

Below Keyhole BBS forum message gives all the links and info.
http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/remlinker.php...amp;Main=132922

Cybarber

[tk421]

Is it possible to use this without a GPX file? I posted the same question here but in sum: got the tagged JPG file but no GPS device so no GPX file? Any ideas? Thanks.

[cybarber]

Well it is rather un-usual to have EXIF GPS tagged JPG images and no GPS file.
(How did you arrive at getting the images GPS tagged(I assume you mean EXIF-GPS)? Sofar I know of only a ricoh digicamera which does that.


I think that most of the software accompanying the camera with which you made these images must have a function to export the EXIF-GPS data to some file.
That file can then be transformed.
ON an individual image basis you could use Opanda EXIF viewer. It lets you export the EXIF(including the GPS) to several file formats(unfortunately it doesn't do that for a whole map with images).

[tk421]

I used the WWMX utility (http://www.wwmx.org/Download.aspx) to stamp my JPGs with GPS info. I like the ability to put the GPS info in the JPG itself so it will always be together, but I really just want to get them into Google Earth. Drag and drop would be ideal, but it seems like GE wants a GPX file instead So I'm trying to generate a GPX file out of these tagged JPGs. I should probably just learn Perl

[cybarber]

I persuaded Tim from Robogeo to make that feature in the new version.
He has included this already in Robogeo Beta 2.1 besides a lot of other interesting features.
www.robogeo.com

Cybarber

[GeoGuy]

That and about 500 other things I can't thank you enough for all of your help.

I released the final version this morning. Info about the Google Earth features can be found at:

http://www.robogeo.com/home/export.asp

And here's a sample of the output:

http://www.robogeo.com/home/robogeo.kmz

Tim Helton