Last modified: 2014-11-19 14:59:24 UTC
Extract heading (=Direction of image) from EXIF/metadata and add it to the location template: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Location
Is there any chance somebody can make this happen? It sounds like a relatively easy thing to do and it would help to make things like GeoCommons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:GeoCommons) even more useful.
What's the exact EXIF field? Is its format standardizes? Where would it go in that template? It does sound straightforward to make, but the specifications should be clear.
*standardized
The relevant EXIF field seems to be Exif.GPSInfo.GPSImgDirection – it contains the heading in degrees, which could be directly plugged into the location template. There is also Exif.GPSInfo.GPSImgDirectionRef which can contain either "T" for true north or "M" for magnetic north. There are other similar fields, for example for the direction the camera was physically moving to, but that's not what we want (think about shooting sideways out of a moving car). Note that the location template (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Location) has two possible types of syntax: One for decimal degrees and one for degrees-minutes-seconds (DMS) kind of data – I'm not sure which one UW uses. Both of them have a parameter for additional attributes (parameter 3 for decimal degrees, parameter 9 for DMS) such as camera heading, region, etc. to be passed to GeoHack. This parameter can potentially hold multiple key-value pairs separated by underscores, but I think the only one that would be used by the UploadWizard would be the heading. In real life, templates would look like this: {{Location|34.02427|-116.15830|heading:180}} for decimal degrees {{Location|34|1|27.37|N|116|9|29.88|W|heading:180}} for DMS Note that there is a colon between the "heading" and the "180", not a "=". Hope that helps?
Addendum: The template does not only accept the camera heading in degrees (0-359) but also letter combinations like SE for south-east. More specifically, it uses the abbreviations of the 32 cardinal points (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Points_of_the_compass#32_cardinal_points). If we also want to make it possible to enter a heading by hand, it might be worth keeping that in mind.
