Snap and Track

A dedicated GPS tracker or a GPS tracking app can come in handy in many situations. Recording and saving your movements can help you geocorrelate photos, keep track of places you've visited, maintain a simple travelogue, and more. Although several excellent apps can be used to transform an Android device into a capable GPS tracker, most of them are one-trick ponies designed to record your location continuously and save the geographical data in the GPX format.

What if you need a tool that does more than that? For example, suppose you want to use your Android device to snap a photo and then save the relevant data – such as date and time, latitude and longitude – in a database or a text file. Wouldn't it be great to have a web-based app that runs on a Linux server and lets you view your snapshots and data using a regular browser? If you have a working knowledge of Python scripting, you can build a tool like this yourself, and this article shows you how to do that.

General Notes and Preparatory Work

The solution you are about to build (I'll call it Geofix) consists of two parts: (1) a simple Python script running on the Android device that automates the process of taking snapshots, collecting the relevant data, and saving it in an SQLite database and (2) a Python-based web app that acts as a front end for viewing the snapshots and the data in the database.

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