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For travel photography I am a fan of slideshows where you actually see where the picture was taken on a map and zoom to the next location.

I just found out that almighty Apple already did this in their iPhoto App (see "Places" video here). I pretty much want exactly that functionality (but I am on Windows). All my photos are geotagged, so it is just a matter of putting some nice labels on a map, maybe some symbols (like a plane flying to the next destination?) and the like and I should be done.

I would love something easy, but if it involves some video editing program like Adobe Premiere - I'm all ears. I just don't want to spend several weeks for creating a slideshow which is only supposed to show images (and the occasional video) chronologically on some nice animated map.

EDIT: There is a video of something I'm trying to achieve. iPhoto? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVgzcEkQGg4

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  • Did someone find something new out? I'm looking for the exact same function.
    – user5586
    Jun 13 '11 at 13:06
  • iPhoto / iMovie is the way to go. I'm actually considering buying a Mac for photo editing purposes as iMovie would not run in a virtual machine due to lacking graphic card support.
    – Dennis G
    Jun 13 '11 at 13:40
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I do not believe there is any automated way to do this on Windows. A lot of these kinds of things pop up on the mac first, as Apple has a huge team that works on their bundle of little iApps like iPhoto. It is a critical part of their platform, and fancy little tools like that help their bottom line.

When it comes to the big dogs in the photo editing software industry (or rather, big dog), Adobe has to divide its attention. There are quite a few demands for specific features and improvements in Lightroom and Photoshop, and a feature that lets you create a slideshow that involves flying around a map zooming into photos isn't something that is commonly requested by the primary user base of those tools.

The simplest solution to what you are trying to do would likely be some kind of mashup with Google or Bing maps, an online photo service (Picasa, Flickr?), and a good chunk of time spent wrangling clever JavaScript and JQuery.

If I were to set off to achieve such a thing myself, I would resort to .NET 4, WPF and/or Silverlight 4, and some C# and XAML. Doing fancy 3D animations with a map and some photos is a perfect use of WPF's 3D and animation capabilities. Can't really say I could get it done in less than a few weeks, but it certainly isn't impossible to do.

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  • Good answer. It's quite true what you are saying about Apple and their time on their hands to create something unique. Of course I'm aware of coding something myself - but it will never run as smooth (and look as good) as the video shown on Apple's site and it is actually supposed to be usable by family members, e.g. put in a DVD watch slideshow. I just know that I saw this "fly over map" feature in some video editing program to create the famous "Indiana Jones travels from Egypt to India to Australia" animations.
    – Dennis G
    Dec 15 '10 at 9:51
  • I wouldn't say that something you create yourself wouldn't run as smoothly. It is also not that difficult these days to render your "map fly over" to a video...at least, not with the latest .NET frameworks. Smoothness is a matter of mathematical precision, and you can either use low precision or very high precision. The difference would be computation speed, so if you are willing to wait a bit, you could generate a very smooth fly over video from your own program.
    – jrista
    Dec 16 '10 at 17:04
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See here for an implementation in a R script with similar features: slideshow-mapmakeR. It takes all the pictures from an input folder, creates maps from Google Maps, and saves them in an output folder before the original picture.

Since R is a statistical programming software, the script does not have all the features intended (i.e. zoom, animation and such), it is mainly intended for displaying maps and photos on simple devices (such as digital picture frames).

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Have a look at www.downrightkenya.org. A group cycled from the UK to Kenya and traced their progress by sending in photos/messages from their cell phones. It is based on Google Maps. Scroll your mouse to zoom in to the details and click on the map pins to see photos/text.

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  • Nice example for using the GMaps API, but not what I am looking for. You could go to panoramio.com/map and achieve the same effect. I really am looking for a slideshow as in: hit play and watch how you travel from one place on the map to the next while pictures are being served for your viewing pleasure.
    – Dennis G
    Dec 15 '10 at 9:59
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I was searching for the same thing and I realized that you could probably make a PREZI. Its online but I think you can download it after. Its very flexible but not so straightforward. Good luck!

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  • What is a “prezi"?
    – mattdm
    Jan 24 '14 at 22:59

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