Visualizing JPEG Exif using Python: How to convert JPEG Meta-Data into Excel Travel Log and Google Map of All Visited Places

Over the past 20+ years, my family took tens of thousands of photos while visiting countries all around the world. As the years went by, the total number of stored images seems to grow every time we travel and even though we organize our images, sometimes it’s hard to recall when (exactly which year and month) we visited a specific place. Thinking about it, I realized that nowadays most photos are captured on smartphones or digital cameras that come equipped with GPS and automatically geotag each photo with GPS coordinates, as well as date and time of each image capture. That said, it shouldn’t be hard to convert the Exif information stored inside photo meta-data into easily readable Excel Travel Log, or too complicated to create a Google Map of all places I ever visited.

ABOUT

So, I wrote a Python GUI App (<300 lines of code) that you can point to a directory where your photos are stored and the script will do the rest. It’ll scan and extract the Exif information from all your images and convert the gathered EXIF information into:

  • Excel Travel Log – List of locations sorted by month/year
  • Google Map – This is a visual representation of all our travels. Google Map pins show the detail date and time of our visit

SCREENSHOTS

Following are some screenshots from the PythonPhoto2Location app, outlining the four steps it takes to get from a collection of photos to an Excel file and Google Maps.

Tested on Windows:

And it also works on Linux:

VIDEO DEMO

Here is a 2-minute long Video outlining the app functionality:

Photo2Location – Source Code:

Application is released as an open-source on Github: https://github.com/JozefJarosciak/PythonPhoto2Location

Feel free to fork it, make it better, or amend the script to your liking.