14/ We hope you enjoyed this thread about staying informed about OpenStreetMap. Thanks for reading and sharing, and have fun mapping and otherwise celebrating OSM's recent 19th birthday 🎂 🍾

We have many more threads about the #geoweirdness of specific countries, border disputes, geocoding, #geoeducation and more linked on our blog.

Enjoy: https://blog.opencagedata.com/geothreads

After a week off to enjoy the summer this week's #geoeducation thread again focuses on OpenStreetMap

The OpenStreetMap community is massive (and growing) 💪, global 🌍, and very dynamic 🕺💃!

The OSM database has millions of edits per day. Lots of things are happening all the time. But ... that can also be a bit overwhelming. How do we stay aware of what's happening?

#OpenStreetMap

1/n

14/ We hope you enjoyed this thread about our OpenStreetMap community interviews. Thanks for reading and sharing, and have fun celebrating OSM's birthday 🎂

We have many more threads about the #geoweirdness of specific countries, border disputes, geocoding, #geoeducation and more linked on our blog. Some still on twitter, but week by week we are moving them to mastodon (and writing new threads)

Enjoy: https://blog.opencagedata.com/geothreads

12/ Obviously there are many, many more OpenStreetMap communities large and small all around the world than those we've had the chance to speak with so far.

Please get in touch if you'd like to share your local story on our blog 🙏🏾

We'd love to hear from you: https://opencagedata.com/contact

#OpenStreetMap #geoeducation

11/ We hope our interviews help show off the diversity of the worldwide OpenStreetMap community. Every region of the world has unique challenges and pleasures.

Hopefully the interviews also remind us we're all working towards the same goal - a shared global map 🌎🌍🌏🗺️👐

You can see the full list of all our OSM interviews here:
https://blog.opencagedata.com/tagged/osminterview

#OpenStreetMap #geoeducation

14/ Thanks for reading (and sharing), we hope you enjoyed this #geoeducation thread.

We have many more threads about the #geoweirdness of specific countries, border disputes, geocoding, etc on our blog. Some still on twitter, but week by week we are moving them to mastodon (and writing new threads)

Enjoy: https://blog.opencagedata.com/geothreads

13/ Now you know how to turn Exif data from images into useful geographic information.

You can find the javascript code example and more background info over in our guide to reverse geocoding images:

https://opencagedata.com/guides/how-to-geocode-images

#geoeducation

12/ Precise geocoding might not make sense. Example: a tourist taking a picture right by the Eiffel Tower 🗼 in Paris 🇫🇷, probably wants their image geocoded as "Eiffel Tower" not the exact street address.

We offer this as a service to several large image processing customers.

#geoeducation

11/ 🚨 WAIT!!! 🚨

The precision of the Exif coordinates depends on the tech (GPS, cell, etc) used to capture the location. So they may not be perfectly precise.

But also showing a precise location might not be appropriate or have privacy implications.

See our guide on how to show less precise location like just the city or neighbourhood:

https://opencagedata.com/guides/how-to-preserve-privacy-by-showing-only-an-imprecise-location

#geoeducation

10/ Now we pass the decimal coordinates to our geocoding API and get the location 🙌

#geoeducation

8/ 🚨 note: an image might not have this data.

It may not have been recorded or might have been removed later. Newer operating systems make it easy to turn geolocation recording on and off, in general or for a specific photo

#geoeducation

6/ How? Two steps:

1. get the coordinates from the exif data in the image

2. reverse geocode the coordinates into useful location information

Let's show a code example in javascript

#geoeducation

5/ These days the most widely used cameras 📸 are mobile phones 📱 and phones generally know their location (from GPS, cell, wifi, etc).

Many phones record this location info in the exif data. We can extract and reverse geocode the location the photo was taken.

#geoeducation

4/ There are also many sites online that let you see a photo’s Exif data. Here’s an example: https://jimpl.com

#geoeducation

3/ Most photo editing software lets you see or write to the Exif data, for example you can fill in fields like copyright and name of the photographer

#geoeducation

2/ When you take a picture by default most digital cameras record all sort of meta info, and store that data in the resulting image file.

Things like type of camera, exposure time, etc.

This is known as "EXIF data". Exif stands for "Exchangeable image file format"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exif

#geoeducation

Time for this week's geothread, a dose of #geoeducation rather than #geoweirdness

Today we thought we'd cover a common geocoding use case: extracting the coordinates from images 📸 and geocoding the location the image was taken.

1/n

10/ Hopefully that clears up the difference between geocoding and IP-geolocation.

Learn more in the guide on our site: https://opencagedata.com/guides/how-ip-geolocation-differs-from-geocoding

Or listen to Ben Dowling, founder of IPinfo, on Ep. 62 of the @geomob podcast. Ben chats with OpenCage co-founder @freyfogle about all the ins and outs of IP geolocation

https://thegeomob.com/podcast/episode-62

#geoeducation

9/ IP geolocation isn't perfect. You can use a VPN to route via another IP so that it looks like your request is coming from somewhere else.

For example if content you want to access is restricted to a certain country - speaking purely theoretically, of course 😉

#geoeducation

8/ There are many players in the IP-to-location market, some more affordable, others claiming their data is more accurate (and thus more expensive 💰💰💰).

Some services also provide all sorts of other network data. Which one to work with will depend on your use case and budget.

#geoeducation