A large collection of graphic materials produced by foreign travellers in Athens, Greece, from the 15th to the 20th century, was recently digitised following all proper standards and ensuring that the digital collection contains rich metadata. A new research project began when a scholar wished to explore the spatiotemporal patterns of production of such graphic material within the collection. While a significant number of files contained geographic metadata such as place and region names, very few had geolocation coordinates embedded in the actual files.

Figure 1. The online record of a digital image collection. Europeana Collections website.  

The above scenario highlights a common problem encountered by scholars who wish to explore the spatiotemporal aspects of a substantial digital archive image collection. Geographic metadata is a prerequisite for performing sophisticated spatial analysis of images, but in reality, very few humanities collections consist of files with such embedded metadata. Geotagging image files is a process that enables the geospatial exploration of such collections. In the following section, you will learn a manual approach to achieve this.

To continue to the next section, you will need to have completed the Geotagging setup guidelines and launch Geosetter.