Map your trips using pics from your phone (+ R code)

my geotagged pics in 2014 and between december 2011 and april 2015

For  a while I wanted to map my flights and the locations I've spent time in throughout the year, so last night I downloaded my location data, which I thought I was tracking for a long time using a few apps. Unfortunately that was not the case. Turns out most apps were not running in the background, and I forgot to start others after rebooting my phone. 

What to do? There's one thing I always do. Taking pictures. Everywhere. These days most pictures are geotagged, or at least the ones taken using smartphones. I found a couple of tutorials online on how to extract metadata from JPEGs in R and Python, and eventually worked with R since thanks to Nathan Yau and this post, I could make better looking maps. Another helpful post was on timelyportfolio, explaining how to extract exif metadata using  exiftool and R. 

Quickstart

I haven't tested much the code, but if you are lucky, this should be sufficient to make your own map:

• get the code from github
  
• download and install exiftool, which is called by the R script
  
• download your pics from your mobile phone (I used Dropbox Camera Uploads)
  
• set the path to your pics folder in the R script
  
• run the script
  

The map will be exported as pdf in the same folder you set as path.

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