kugelfish

What I still miss the most after moving from G+ to Diaspora* for a my casual public social network posting is a well integrated mobile app for posting on the go. The main use-case for me is posting photos on the go, which I now mostly take on my cellphone and minimally process with Google Photos. One of the problems with the mobile app for Diaspora* (Dandelion in the case of Android) is that the size limit for photo uploads is quite small compared to the resolution of todays cellphone cameras. There is also not much point of uploading  high-resolution images for purely on-screen consumption to an infrastructure managed by volunteers on a shoestring budget. I also liked the ability to geo-tag the mobile posts by explicitly selecting a nearby landmark to obfuscate a bit the current location. For a few weeks now, I have been sharing my account with a  G+ archive bot  that is uploading recycled posts from the takeout archive (see here for the first part of the series ...

Photos exported from digital cameras often contain meta-data in Exif format (Exchangeable Image File Format). For images taken with cellphone cameras, this info typically also includes (GPS) location information of where the photo was taken. Inspired by this previous post on the mapping of GPS lat/lon coordinates from Google+ location data to a rough description of the location, we could also use the location encoded in the photo itself. We are using again the reverse geocoding service from OpenStreetMap to find the names of the country and locality in which the GPS coordinates are included in. For the purpose of public posting, reducing the accuracy of the GPS location to the granularity of the city town or village provides some increased confidentiality of where the picture was taken compared to the potentially meter/centimeter resolution accuracy of GPS data that generally allows to pinpoint the location down to a building and street address. Fractional numbers are repre...