Shell script to add different GPS data to series of photos

Question

I have a drone that I used to make a flight movie, and I am going to use this footage to build a DEM (digital elevation model) of the topography I was filming. I can extract frames from the movie easily enough, but the method (ffmpeg) does not give these frames the lat-lon-elev-etc information necessary to reliably build the DEM. All this data is available in a .csv file stored in the drone flight control app, which I have downloaded.

I want to extract from this .csv file all the columns of navigational data. I can do this using awk. Then I want to write a script that will attach the navigational data from a certain timestamp in the flightpath to a corresponding still frame extracted from the movie (at the same timestamp). I can use exiftool for attaching GPS data to an image, but being quite new to shell scripting I cannot get my current nested loop to work.

Currently, my script writes all lines from the .csv file to every picture in the folder. Instead, I want to write line1 (lat-lon-elev-etc) to photo1, line2 to photo2, and so on. I feel I should be able to fix this, but can't crack it: any help very welcome!

# Using awk, extract the relevant columns from the flightpath dataset
awk -F, '{print $1,$2,$3,$7,$15,$22,$23 }' test.csv > test2.csv

# Read through .csv file line-by-line
# Make variables that can be commanded
while IFS=" " read -r latitude longitude altitude time compHeading gimbHeading gimbPitch
do

# exiftool can now command these variables
# write longitude and latitude to some photograph
    for photo in *.png; do
    exiftool -GPSLongitude="$longitude"  -GPSLatitude="$latitude" *.png
    done

# Following line tells bash which textfile to draw data from
done < test2.csv

You may also want to take a look at [gpscorrelate](http://freefoote.dview.net/linux_gpscorr.html) (you'll still need to add EXIF timestamps to the images first). PS: Elevation from a typical GPS receiver has a fair bit of error, consider adding a air pressure sensor altimeter... — derobert, Feb 10 '17 at 14:59
Is the `*.png` at the end of the `exiftool` command line intentional, or should that be `"$photo"`? Does the original CSV file contain any information that could be used to pair the data with the photo? — Kusalananda, Feb 10 '17 at 15:03

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 10 '17 at 14:52

If you have the same number of photos as there are lines in the CSV file, then you can use a simple for loop:

for photo in *.png; do
  IFS=" " read -r latitude longitude altitude time compHeading gimbHeading gimbPitch
  exiftool -GPSLongitude="$longitude"  -GPSLatitude="$latitude" "$photo"
done < test2.csv

Shell script to add different GPS data to series of photos

1 Answers1