Mappics

Mappics is a map based travel photos gallery, with automatic place and weather description of the very moment the photos are taken.

It will process all the images placed in a specific directory and perform these operations:

• it fetches Exif data, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exif), which usually contain camera model and settings, GPS information, and date and time the photo was taken
• it fetches place description. A short one (like Goðafoss Waterfall and a long one (like Goðafoss Waterfall, Goðafossvegur, Öxará, Þingeyjarsveit, Norðurland eystra, Ísland). This is based on the Exif GPS information stored in the photo and obtained from Nominatim and OpenStreetMap APIs
• it fetches weather forecast in the place and moment the photo was taken. This is based on the Exif GPS information and the creation date of the photo, and obtained from the DarkSky APIs
• it creates a resized version of the image and a thumbnail, and store them in a different folder from the original one

All these information are shown in galleries and pop up with photos and details, using Leaflet javascript library and Mapbox maps. Frontend is based on Bootstrap framework and backend is written in PHP on top of some Symfony components.

Mappics includes also a backend interface (based on EasyAdminBundle) that lets you modify descriptions, coordinates and creation date of the photos.

You can see a working version here: http://pics.antodippo.com.

Usage

Mappics provides a simple console command to process images. To configure and run the command you will have to:

1. obtain API keys from external services:
   • Dark Sky API: https://darksky.net/dev/register
   • Mapbox: https://account.mapbox.com/auth/signin/?route-to=%22/access-tokens/%22
2. deploy the application (see dedicated paragraph for details)
3. edit your /.env file adding the keys from step 1
4. place your images in the <root>/var/galleries directory (Mappics supports jpg and png images), organized in folders (they will become galleries)
5. run the console command bin/console mappics:process-galleries from the <root> directory
6. go to the home page and enjoy your photos!

If you have a lot of images this command can take a long time, so you may want to run it in background:

bin/console mappics:process-galleries &

or, if you want to set-it-and-forget-it and just upload photo every now and then, you could run it as a cron job (it has a lock which prevents multiple execution):

0 * * * * /var/www/mappics/current/bin/console mappics:process-galleries

To access the admin backend you must set the ADMIN_PWD variable in the /.env file, and then access it from www.your-domain.com/mappics-admin.

Deploy

One option is to make Mappics run on Apache with PHP module. You will have to install and enable the following PHP extensions:

php-curl
php-mbstring
php-zip
php-gd
php-xml
php-exif

You can find a sample virtual host file in /docker/vhost.conf and a Dockerfile to have a better understanting of the system stack needed.

To deploy and update Mappics you can also find a simple configuration for https://deployer.org, in /deploy.sample.php, so you will have to:

1. install Deployer
2. edit the sample file adding you host information (see comments in file and documentation)
3. rename the file in deploy.php
4. run dep deploy (to install the latest version)

If you want to deploy a specific version you can also use the tag option: dep deploy --tag="1.0.0"

Run on your local machine

The suggested way to run and work on Mappics in a local enviroment is Docker:

1. install Docker on your machine
2. clone the repository: git clone git@github.com:antodippo/mappics.git
3. build Mappics application: make setup
4. run tests: make test
5. run application: make start
6. browse Mappics on http://localhost:8080
7. stop application: make stop

You should get an empty Mappics home page. To fill it, see the "Usage" paragraph.