New features on map view

This post to share some new features on map view.

Location

The location module is the oldest one. It is available on darktable 3.4.

This module allows to draw shapes on the map to group images from the same region.
The shape can be circle, ellipsis, square or rectangle.
Every location is seen in as a collection in collect module.

Thumbnails

For darktable 3.6 now. There is a new choice in map settings about the way to display the thumbnails:

  • thumbnail, as today.
  • count. Only the count marker is shown, which allows to have an unobstructed view of the map.
  • none.

As the marker is smaller you can decrease the group size factor to get more accurate groups:

Geotagging

The geotagging module is now able to discriminate the different tracks of a GPX file and is available on map.
On map the user can display the different tracks and the corresponding matching images. It’s then easy to adjust the original date/time of the images to get perfect positions.

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Thanks @phweyland. I suppose you talk about darktable 3.4 (and not 2.4) and darktable 3.6 (and not 2.6) here.

Of course. thanks. I fix this. :slight_smile:

Very cool, nice that the map view gets more updates. It would be great to be able to export the displayed map as an image.

Great work !

Great!
Thx

I am having plenty of classical tags describing locations. All are placed on the map as well. How do I transfer and convert my classical tags to the new location module ?

My ‘old’ tags look like this:

Location|Continent|Country|State|City|Area

Any advice and idea will help, thank you!

There is no automatic way to do this.
Even if the locations are also tags under the hood there are some other associated data (geo-location, shape, size, …) which are not easy to calculate automatically.

The manual process I can think off, is the following, all on map view:

  • In collect/tag module select one location/area as you have defined. The map should centers around these collected images.
  • In tagging module, edit the same tag and copy the name
  • In location module, create a new location, paste the name, adjust it as needed, enter
  • Adjust the shape to cover all images.

And this for all your locations/areas … a bit boring I guess.

You can check the result checking the corresponding “collect/geotagging → tagged/location name” collections.

Hi phweyland,

having roughly a 1000 location tags, i do not think thios is a way forward.

Do you recommend to change ist are should i keep it as it is?

Selecting tags to search for locations rather than search geotaggt locations does not seem to make a dfference at all, besides the fact, that the geo-location data was not written to the database doint it my way, right?

Thanks!

Well, that’s a personal choice.
The main differences between locations and manual tagging are the following:

  • when a new location is created, all images inside the shape are automatically included.
  • when images are newly geotagged, they are automatically included in corresponding locations.

Locations are kind of dynamic collections based on images’ geo-location.

Dynamic, that makes sense now. Are they allowed to overlap or even include each other, such that an image can be part of Paris, France, and Europe?

Hm, for drawing the borders of Paris, France or Europe one would probably need a polygon tool, as circle, rectangle, etc. are failing here :wink:. (And with that probably an import/export solution for these, as it hardly makes sense that everybody draws his own Europe. K, bad example, but you get the point …)

Anyway, great work, thank you very much!

Overlapping. Yes they can overlap. On the other hand if you set up a hierarchy of locations, you don’t need to define embedding locations. Locations work as tags (and tag path).

I confirm this limitation. :slight_smile:
In principle this should be possible, but, complexity aside, I’m not sure that, while granularity increasing, we could guaranty a reasonable response time.

Response time for the map UI? Just for my technical curiosity, is it about detecting if a picture is inside the shape? Is it much more simple for a circle than for an arbitrary shape? K, probably yes, as you might be able to compare regarding the distance. Or is the bottleneck somewhere else?

Yes it’s far easier to check if coordinates are inside a circle or a rectangle than inside a free shape.
For a free shape (polygon) you need to run some algorithm instead of a simple formula.
And the more the shape is complex the more the calculation time increases…

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Thank you very much for the explanation, and, again, for the excellent work you are putting into darktable!

image

Some country polygons examples (nb of points):
India: 114.192
Austria: 112.914
France: 63.095
Deutschland: 151.124
Brasil: 89.542

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maybe not unplayable…

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A PR for polygon locations, if someone wanted to test and comment: here

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It’s in master now. Thanks for this new feature!

Basic guidance can be found in the PR.

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