geotagging and mapping photos

In order to incorporate the photos into an online map, the photos must live on the web somewhere. You'll want to make sure your image files are accessible through a web browser before attempting to make a map out of them.

In most cases, you will need an FTP program and permission to upload files to a web site. If you do not normally upload material directly into your web account, ask your administrator for assistance.

If you're working at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, skip the FTP instructions here and see the Special instructions for Knight Workshop participants (below) instead.

FTP Users

Access your FTP account and create a directory for the photos, such as a folder named "photowalk" in the "photos" section of your web site. The resulting URL may look something like this: http://mysite.com/photos/photowalk/ . This is the online path to your image files.

Upload your photos. Once the upload is complete, test the URL of one of the photos to make sure they are visible online. For example, if you uploaded an image file named "image1.jpg," the resulting URL might look something like:

http://mysite.com/photos/photowalk/image1.jpg

When you input that address in your browser, image1.jpg should appear in the browser window.

The next step is to create a spreadsheet of data that includes links to these image files.

Special instructions for Knight Workshop participants

Due to the setup of the journalism school's network, you don't need to upload your photos through an FTP program.

Instead, open a Finder window and select the "Home" icon in the left-hand column. In the example below, that folder is "student2." Then navigate to your Sites folder. Now you can drag your folder of photos somewhere within the Sites folder. (Or, you can create a new folder and drag only selected photos into it.) Be sure this new folder has no spaces in its name, since this name will be incorporated into the URL and spaces are problematic in URLs.

Next, synchronize this directory with your remote directory on the live web server by clicking the twin "home" icon at the far upper right corner of the screen.

Choose Sync Home Now.

When the sync process is complete, your images will be available online. You can view the images individually to confirm this by going to an address that will look something like this:

http://people.journalism.berkeley.edu/~student2/images/image1.jpg 

The last half of this address, "~student2/images/image1.jpg", will vary depending on which computer you are using and what you name your folders and images. Remember that folder names in your Sites folder have a 1-to-1 relationship with the resulting URL. For example if you created an "images" folder inside of Sites, and a "photowalk" folder inside of that, your resulting image URLs will look like:

 http://people.journalism.berkeley.edu/~student2/images/photowalk/image1.jpg