Exporting and plotting GPS coordinates from cell phone photos

Recently I was interested in seeing all the places I’ve taken photos and found a way of extracting exif data (specifically lat/long) from images stored on my cell phone. Here are the steps I used.

Generate the CSV file

To begin, start by installing exiftool. This can done on OS X by running “brew install exiftool” (assuming you have Homebrew installed).

The following will generate a CSV file (photogps.csv) from jpg images containing the name of the file, GPS lat, and GPS long.

exiftool -csv -c "%+.6f" -gpslatitude -gpslongitude -T *.jpg | grep -v "\-," > photogps.csv