Attaching a large number photos to a large number of different points

Question

Hey there,

I want to start this off by saying I am extremely new to ArcGIS, and GIS in general. I've been using ArcGIS Pro and Online for about 2 days now and am trying to take in as much as I can.

I have been working on a project over the past year in Google My Maps to map out every single photo taken on September 11, 2001 in NYC and attributing those photos to their photographers. I have just over 4,000 points and about 7,000 photos on the Google Map as of now.

That Google map can be viewed here:
https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/viewer?mid=1CfMGLF8tvw_wTs3wZISwkvpdxxYxHnY&ll=40.71175962035136%2C-74.01342150129352&z=17

My current recreation in an "Attachment Viewer" InstantApp in ArcGIS Online:

https://archdisk.maps.arcgis.com/apps/instant/attachmentviewer/index.html?appid=bb049919f4c348218970cc4e555410eb

There are some limitations with Google My Maps that I wanted to look into other options for. ArcGIS seems to take care of pretty much every limitation - tagging, search functionality, additional base layers, all sorts of reporting, and modularity of all of this data.

The one issue I only have left to deal with currently is that when I exported the KML files from Google My Maps, I was left with only a tiny thumbnail of the original photo attached to each point. Additionally, most of those thumbnails did not work on the ArcGIS Online map. I've come to terms with the reality that I will need to reattach the 7,000+ images to my existing 4,069 points on the map.

My issue I am seeing is that attaching these images in ArcGIS Online is extremely repetitive, and seems to be extremely inefficient. My experience so far has been manually selecting each individual point on the map. Some points on the map have about 20 photos from the same photographer standing in one location. One specific point I have already added was 8 photos, and I needed to search for each photo and add them individually -- I was not able to highlight the 8 images I wished to attach at the same time.

I just wanted to see if there is any advice somebody more experienced than me could provide when it comes to adding all of these images. I've seen some tools which assist with adding the same image to many points, but I am mostly wanting to verify if there's another interface where I can add these image attachments to the points. Currently there are about 7,000, but I have another 15,000 remaining from what I have been provided by survivors and others online.

If I am S.O.L., that is fine and I will spend a couple hundred hours doing this as I am very personally invested in this project of mine, but I would like to see if I could save maybe 100 hours or so of additional tedious labor, haha.

Thank you!

archDisk · Answer

It puts a thumbnail of the larger image in a "PopupInfo" field, which also contains other data which I manually entered in Google My Maps. I wanted to take that info and then divide it up into other custom attributes (Address, Source, Time, Notes) but that too I am certain will be mostly manual effort because I didn't have these neat feature's in Google -- only a single large text box to place my information and I tried to make it as tidy as I could.

It seems that when uploaded to the Google map, clicking on that thumbnail image brings up a larger, full-screen copy of the image and this functionality doesn't convert over to ArcGIS.

I'm not yet too familiar with the whole process for ArcGIS, but yes most of the images are additionally hosted on Imgur (I try to have them spread out as much as possible). I just want to take advantage of that Attachment functionality in the InstantApp because it works exactly the way I had hoped it would work. I just haven't explored using externally hosted images in that attachment field or if it is at all possible.

I'll explore the ArcGIS Python API and pray ChatGPT can help bridge the gap between my knowledge and what is needed to make it work. A few days of research and if I start running in circles I'll go the manual route.

jcarlson · Answer

It would be a bit of a thing to set up, but you could use Python to loop through the KMZ and pull out all the point data.

How does ArcGIS Pro / Online deal with the KMZ data? Do you get the image links as an attribute?

If you have the image URLs and the files are just being hosted elsewhere, like imgur, do you really need attachments?

If you do, the ArcGIS Python API makes it easy to attach files to a feature, if you're comfortable working with Python. We used it to attach a few thousand permit PDFs to point features, since we could find the feature by permit number, which was also the PDF filename.

Since the KML has the coordinates and the URL, you could add the point, then attach all files to it in one go. Easier said than done, though!