GEOTAGGING PHOTO FROM A SPATIALLY REFERENCED GPS DATA USING GEOTAGPHOTO SOFTWARE

Mapping areas vulnerable to disasters is crucial in disaster planning and management. For instance, areas prone to and affected by flooding need to be geographically tagged. Hence, ground validation is needed in the process of visualizing these affected areas. The use of Global Positioning System (GPS) with a built in camera can perform geotagging by capturing photos with spatial information. However, in many cases it has become a limitation to Local Government Unit (LGU) volunteers, student researchers and other Geographic Information System (GIS) practitioners because of its cost. The paper shows a semi-automatic method of integrating geographic location of photos from a simple camera with reference to the spatial information of the GPS ’ track points. This is done using the GeoTagPhoto software which integrates Exchangeable Image File Format (EXIF) information of the photos with reference to the gps ’ spatial information. The output photo will have its metadata with longitude and latitude information which geographically locates where it was taken. With the use of GIS software like ArGIS, these geotagged photos will be converted to point location and will be used as the reference point to view the photo of that location. The process provides basic method of optimizing technology thereby capacitating interested individuals in mapping and GIS. 1