I’ve wanted to tag my pictures in Live Photos on the web with location information to allow anyone (including me) to quickly jump to a map.
The Windows Live Photo Gallery client has more tagging options than the web product, but neither offers geotagging. I recommended it to the Live team as a desired feature, but in the meantime I decided to take matters into my own hands. I can’t add tagging functionality, but I can get tricky with the comment area.
This document provides steps to create a URL (web address) to put into the comment of a photo. When clicked, the URL will not only take you to Live Maps, but it will also zoom in on the location where you took the photo.
This was a challenge to figure out. I recommend it for advanced users.
Find Latitude and Longitude for Your Photo
If you have Latitude and Longitude for your photo, then you can tell Live Maps exactly where to go.
I can’t for the life of me figure out how to get those values out of Live Maps. Fortunately, I found a web site where someone else has programmed the extraction so I can get my data quite easily. Take a look at this UK web site: http://www.hmmm.ip3.co.uk/longitude-latitude/
1. Enter a location in the typing box under the map. I was successful with locations in the UK, France, and Belgium.
2. Zoom into the map so you can accurately single-click the final destination.
3. Under the box where you typed, the latitude and longitude appear. Drag through and copy them.
4. For safety, I ran Notepad and pasted the values into a new, blank document.
5. You’ll eventually need the latitude and longitude in this format: latitude~longitude (with a tilde between and no spaces). I went ahead and created the combination in Notepad so that it would be ready to copy and paste. In Notepad, I have a line that reads like this: Latitude: 50.952946 Longitude: 0.735169 50.952946~0.735169 The maroon part represents the data I pasted in from the Hmmm… web site and the green is what I got after editing, copying, pasting, and adding a tilde.
6. Then you build a URL which you paste in as a comment for an image in Photos on the web.
Building a URL
Your URL needs to
- Get you to Live Maps
- Specify a location in the special latitude~longitude format
- Indicate whether to use a street, aerial, or bird’s eye view
- Indicate the zoom level
1. I chose to create my URL on a fresh line in the Notepad document. Eventually, when the URL is done, I can copy and pasted it into the comment typing box on a photo’s web page.
2. Start the URL with http://maps.live.com/default.aspx? This will get you to Maps Live when it is part of the finished URL. You should be typing this in Notepad, not a browser. You’re going to piece together a URL a little bit at a time.
3. Use no spaces. Continue typing cp=latitude~longitude where the words are replaced with values. Instead of typing the long numbers and possibly making a mistake, I copied within Notepad and pasted. Remember the green data up above where I took the raw latitude and longitude and pieced them together with a tilde in-between? Well, that’s what you need to put after cp=.
4. Type an ampersand (&), the word style, an equal sign, and a code letter for the desired style: for example, &style=r
- a means aerial view
- r means road view
- h means aerial view with labels
- o means bird’s eye
- b means bird’s eye with labels
5. Now type an ampersand, lvl, an equal sign, and the zoom level as a code: for example, &lvl=12
6. If you chose bird’s eye view, you also have to add a scene ID reference number: for example, &scene=1234567
Figuring Out the Level and Scene Values
I cannot tell you how to guess values for level and scene, but I can show you how to figure them out.
1. Take your browser to Live Search Maps and find the desired location.
2. Zoom in to the desired level.
3. If you want a URL that will invoke bird’s eye view, click the button to turn that on (it’s not always available).
4. Study the URL that is offered by Live Maps. You’re looking for the lvl= value and if appropriate, the scene= value. Do this by clicking the Share button. In this example, bird’s eye is already on.
5. Once you expose the URL offered by Live Maps, you’ll need to dissect it. Buried in the example’s very long, very complex URL is &style=b and &lvl=1. The former means bird’s eye with labels and the latter means zoom level 1. It’s cut off here, but you can also see the scene value for this map, &scene=. That only appears for bird’s eye view.
6. Now that you have those values, you can finish your URL.
What you’ve just accomplished is to have setup a map just the way you want it linked to a photo. Then you looked at the way Live Maps built a URL. You copied a few critical values to add to your own URL instead of trying to guess what they would be.
Why don’t I just use the URL offered by Live Maps?
There are a few reasons to create a URL rather than using the one offered by Maps.
- I wanted a very precise location; latitude/longitude provide that.
- I don’t know what the automatic center point value (cp=) represents. When I use latitude/longitude, I know it’s a universal value that can be used elsewhere. Perhaps I’ll have a GPS one day.
- The automatic URL is too long to put in the comment box. Yes it will fit, but it’s huge. If I used it, I would add the step of shrinking it with tinyurl.com or a similar program.
- The automatic URL is too complex. I like to understand what I’m working with; through understanding I gain control.
OK, I have a URL. Now what?
Copy the URL from Notepad and paste it into the comment box under a photo on Live Photos site. Then click Add.
This is a finished comment. The first line is a note to myself with just the map coordinates. The second line is a live link with the URL that I built. It takes the viewer to Live Maps, to an exact location, and to my preferred zoom level.
Related Information
The parameter values are detailed in a Microsoft help file. When in http://maps.live.com/ look near the bottom of your browser’s window for a small menu bar that includes Help. Click it.
In help’s Search For box, type url and hit your Enter key. Look for the help topic titled Build your own URL.
Examples
I built three example URLs to go with this blog post. Each invokes a different style map. You can see them here: My Tag Test Photo Album
Click a photo in the album and then scroll down to see the comments. If you click my map link, you’ll leave the album and go to the map. If you right-click the link, you can choose to open the map in a new tab or a new window.
Feedback
I’m in the US. I don’t know why this wouldn’t work in another country, but if it doesn’t, I’d like to know so I can add a note/correction/disclaimer.
Second, if you see an easier way to do a task like getting the coordinates directly from Live Maps rather than an 3rd party, I’d love to know about it.
~ Brien
