GSoC: Reverse Geocoding and Improved Map Search project for digiKam

Hello to all digikam and KDE fans!

My name is Gabriel Voicu, I am 20 years old and I come from Bucharest, Romania where I'm studying Computer Science and Engineering at University Politehnica of Bucharest. I enjoy programming, playing basket-ball and spending time with my girlfriend.

I was very happy when I saw that I was accepted to this year Google Summer of Code with the project "Reverse Geocoding and Improved Map Search" because I consider this feature very useful when talking about images geotagging.

Since I've been accepted, I studied the documentation, made an UI proposal and made the tabs from the Correlator2 Widget collapse and expand when an user clicks the same tab. It felt very good to see it working, because it was the first time when I put my code into a really big project.

Now let me explain a little bit about this project. It has 4 parts, but now I will write in detail only about the first quarter. Here, I should make a Reverse Geocoding Widget who will give the user the possibility to add human-readable information such as country, city and street into his images metadata, based on already existing GPS coordinates. I will use backends from Google Maps, Open Street Map Nominatim or geonames.org to retrieve the information, then I will store it into the XMP or IPTC. With information located into the images metadata, the user will have an option to automatically tag his images by location. The Reverse Geeocoding Widget will be integrated into the already existing Correlator2 Widget developed by Michael G. Hansen (who is also my mentor) and the rest of the team. I've put here an UI proposal, so if you have any idea about an improvement, please let me know. The project has also a wiki page here.

The other three parts from this project would be: improving of the Worldmap Widget, adding "search by location" into the Advances Search Tool and adding the option to display images directly on the map instead of the icon-based virtual album.

I'm very happy to work on a KDE project and I'm looking forward to continue working with digiKam developers because they are doing a very good job and also, they are very friendly people.