Is there a way to let users submit geotagged photos to an ArcGIS online map?

[charliemix]

I'm creating a web map via ArcGIS online. On my organization's website, we have a page where users can submit "field notes" which are photos with a caption. Is there an easy to automatically display these user submitted photos? My web site and programming language is minimal, so thanks for any help and/or resources!

-Charlie

[ChristopherThompson]

Do the photos already have associated coordinates? or do those have to be created? If you can upload a KML file to arcgisOnline then you might look at using one of several tools out there for creating geotagged images.  One i'm familiar with is called Geosetter - its free and pretty easy to use (i've used it to process literally thousands of images) and it creates KLM files that you can view in Google Earth or google maps.  There are other utilities out there as well that do this, I just happen to use geosetter because its a free tool.

[AlexeyTereshenkov]

Hi Charlie,

There is a tool that let you convert those geotagged photos into a point feature class (based on XY) and optionally store the photo content in a geodatabase as feature attachment (which means you can get a photo in a configured pop-up window in ArcGIS Online). At least hosted feature services as part of an ArcGIS Online for Organizations subscription will support attachments you configured.

The tool's name is GeoTagged Photos To Points (Data Management toolbox)

Showing attachments in pop-up: ArcGIS.com Help

[charliemix]

thanks for the feed back. Geotagging pics and changing them to features isn't exactly the issue. Basically we are trying to crowd source content. Ideally, I would like users to be able to upload their geotagged pic directly to the map. Sounds like a job for a developer eh?

Thanks again,
-Charlie

[AlexeyTereshenkov]

Charlie, when you say you want to let users upload the pictures onto the map, I assume you have the following workflow in mind:

1. User choose what geotagged picture should be uploaded
2. A geotagged picture is being uploaded into a web site
3. XY coordinates are parsed
4. A layer with point features is being created and populated with points based on parsed XY values
5. Features get source geotagged pictures as attachments which can be viewed from pop-up windows

Sounds close? Modify as applicable.

[charliemix]

yes, that is exactly what I'm trying to do.

thanks,
charlie

[AlexeyTereshenkov]

Hi Charlie,

Good. I'd take this approach in this case (I'd try to avoid programming and try to solve as much as possible with geoprocessing aka GP):

Implement a GP service with the upload functionality (10.1) based on the GeoTagged Photos To Points tool. Create a web application that consumes this GP service allowing a user click on a button "Submit photo" - when clicking the button the GP task fires up, user uploads a geotagged photo, and a georeferenced point feature class is created (or a newly created feature class gets appended to an existing feature class with previously added features) behind the scenes on the server side. A feature class has attachments enabled and the source picture is being added as an attachment with the Add Attachments GP tool. The pop-up windows in web application should be used to show the picture attached.

To implement this, you would need ArcGIS Server 10.1 and ArcGIS Desktop 10.1 installation plus learning a bit of geoprocessing and working with GP services (eventually some minor developing with any ArcGIS Web Mapping API). Unfortunately, you cannot do this just with ArcGIS Online..