ArcGIS Explorer Blog : photos

Adding photos to your map using notes

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 16:53:00 GMT

Notes are an easy way to add a wide variety of non-GIS content to your map, like photos, videos, Web pages, PDF files, and more. Using notes you can place any of these in a geographic context, and use them with other layers in your map and in presentations. Here we'll take a look at how to use notes to add photos to your map.

The other weekend we were up in the Sierra Nevada range, near a peak named Chocolate Peak, and took a GPS reading and some photos. One option would be to place a point note interactively by clicking the map at the desired location of where we want to place the photo. But since we took a GPS reading, let's use the GPS location to place it. Here's the steps.

Use Find and enter the GPS coordinates

Once the location has been entered, you'll see a pushpin on the map. Right click to move the location to your map contents. When you do it becomes a note.

Here's the note in our contents.

Next we'll click the note title to change it. We could also change this when editing the popup window as you'll see below, but we'll take care of this here.

Our next step is to edit the popup window contents and add the path to our photo. There are a variety of ways to open the popup window. We could click the note pushpin on the map, or can right-click the note in our contents and choose Show Popup.

And another way is by using the contextual tabs which apear in the ribbon. Click Popup Content to open the popup window directly in edit mode.

Once the popup window is open, we want to make sure we're in edit mode by clicking in the lower right corner of the popup window.

All we need to do now is add the path to our photo. We can also edit the title again if we want to.

The path can also be a URL, and using public URL locations is a good way to make sure that users we share our map or note with can also see our photo in the popup. Obviously if we use a local path on our laptop another user may not be able to see the photo in the popup. If we use a more widely accessible network location or public URL, then any user can view our photo.

And we can even E-mail our note directly from the popup window to share it with others.

You can get more information about notes by viewing the following Help topics:

Adding Geotagged Photos To Your Map

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 22:03:00 GMT

One of the new tasks delivered with ArcGIS Explorer 480 is the Add Photo task. The Add Photo task places photos that have been geotagged on the map. Have a look at the video, then follow along in this post.

Let's take a closer look. First, add the task from the ArcGIS Explorer Resource Center. Choose File > Resource Center and from the Content tab choose Tasks. You can also open the Resource Center by choosing Help > ArcGIS Explorer Resource Center, then click on the Content tab, then Tasks. The Add Photo task is circled below, just click to add it to Explorer.

Your photos must have been taken with a GPS enabled camera that can capture the location in the image header (written to the EXIF header). An increasing number of cameras (like the Ricoh GPS camera, some Nikon models, and others) and even camera equiped cell phones (like the Nokia N95) are GPS-enabled.

If you don't have one of these devices the location can be added to your photos afterwards using applications like Google Picasa and others.

Activate the task and click Browse to navigate to a folder containing geotagged photos. The folder's contents are displayed in the task (note that only JPEG format images are supported). Just check the photos you want to add, and click Place Photos.

A collection of results will appear, and the photos will be placed on your map.

When you click the result the photo will open in the popup window. Here we've added a couple of geotagged photos taken during a recent search and rescue operation in the San Bernardino Mountains near Redlands. These photos were taken by a member of the SAR team, and are now placed on our Explorer map.

The Add Photo task allows you to specify settings which let you control whether subfolders are searched, and how various image sizes are handled and displayed in the popup window.

Adding Photos and More to Note Popups

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 00:21:00 GMT

We've recently had a few questions about adding photos, links to Web sites, and more to a note popup window. Here's a primer on how that's done. But before we get to the "photos and more" part, let's start at the beginning...

We've navigated to Mt. Shasta, California, where we'd like to add a note. To create a note, just choose the Create Notes task. We've changed the note title to "Mt. Shasta" and added a short description - "Mt. Shasta, California - 14,179 feet" - as the note text.

When you hover over the note pushpin, you'll see the note title display. When you click the note pushpin, you'll see something like this:

Let's take this one step further and replace the text with a locally stored photo on our C: drive. Right click the Mt. Shasta note in the results panel, or right click the note pushpin on the map, and choose properties.

Below you can see that we've changed the popup content from our original text (Mt. Shasta, California - 14,179 feet) to the pathname to the file: C:\AGX\Photos\shasta_usgs.jpg.

When we click the note pushpin again, we see something like this:

The USGS publishes photos of Mt. Shasta from their Web site, so we can substitute the local photo with one that's available on the Web. The advantage here is that anyone we send the note to can click the pushpin and see the photo since it's a publicly accessible photo rather than one stored on the local C: drive, which nobody else can access.

All we need to do is replace the local file path in the Popup Text property with the URL location of the photo at the USGS Web site: http://vulcan.wr.usgs.gov/Imgs/Jpg/Shasta/Images/Shasta05_aerial_mount_shasta_shastina_from_west_12-10-05_med.jpg

The note popup will look the same as before, but this time the content is Web-based and shareable rather than a local file. To share this with someone, just right click the note and choose export result.

The NMF file you save can be emailed to anyone, and they'll see the same thing you do since the result is linking to publicly available content.

We can extend the popup contents by using HTML. The HTML isn't required if we just want to display text or a single link to a local file or URL like we've done above. But we can use it to add additional content or format the popup contents. Here we're adding a note that will include a title in bold text to our USGS photo:

And now the popup should look something like this:

And now to the "more" part of this post. Here's the HTML you can use to popup a photo of a bird, and also play the sound of its call.

The use of hidden in the embed tag ensures that the program that plays the sound remains invisible.

You can be as creative as you want. For more information visit the HTML markup for notes, results, and files topic found in the ArcGIS Explorer Help.