Importing geotagged images to QGIS
Import Photos QGIS plugin - geolocation of images taken by your smartphone
This tutorial is about a great QGIS plug-in that may come in handy.!
You have probably done some in-situ measurements or an in-situ inspection and you have taken some photos. You would like to see the geographic location of the images since this will help you remember the area faster and make better decisions for your analysis.
Before taking the pictures, we need to activate the geolocation from camera settings on the smartphone (see below image). This image may vary based on the smartphone you use. The location on the smartphone should be on as well.
After taking the images, you need to transfer them to your PC. This can be done in many ways such as using USB cable, Bluetooth, cloud storage, etc. Be aware that the name of each image is the date and time when the picture was taken. The following picture was taken from the folder where the images are located. The green rectangle shows the date (year-month-day) whereas the red one shows the time (hours-minutes-seconds).
Let’s get started with QGIS!
Firstly, we need to install plug-in named “Import images”.
You may see that a new toolbar was added which has three icons.
Then, we need to import the geotagged images we took to QGIS. We just need to press the very left button (with the upwards arrow). On the pop up window:
1. Select the folder where your images are located (“input folder location).
2. Select where the new file will be saved (select shapefile as type) (“output folder location). Press Ok.
A pop-up window will show up highlighting how many images were added successfully. As can be seen, all of them were added without any problem.
The images were also added to QGIS canvas. Layer “geotagged_mages” was added to the table of contents on the left.
To view a specific image, you need to follow the steps: (1) select the newly created layer “geotagged_images” from the table of contents, (2) click on the second icon of the toolbar (see image below), and (3) click on the image you want from map canvas.
The image selected is highlighted with yellow color on the map canvas.
There are many available tools at the bottom of each image window such as rotation, zooming in etc.
Conclusion
Well done! That’s it! You learned how to import geotagged images to QGIS. I hope this tutorial comes in handy in your future projects!
