Photo tracker revisited for Scout camp post Panoramio

 When I wrote The Scout reservation photo map tracker in 2010, I was on a roll with the now-closed Panoramio site. I would take pictures, geo-locate them, and share with the world. But Google shut down panoramio.com, hiding many if not most of my contributions. You can see them sometimes with Google maps or Google Earth (pro) if you look in the right places.

Even though I did a Google "takeout" to download my archives, the formerly useful geocodes were cplit from the image, which to be honest, not all even had in the JPEG metadata.

In 2018 I made efforts to re-share my content on another site since I still had the original images as well as lower-resolution ones Google coughed up, but put the project aside after posting one picture. And that image, on closer examination, was not placed in the right spot anyway. Locations can be tricky!

I was pleasantly surprised when searching for one of my original Panoramion shots to discover that the WayBak machine of archive.org had slurped out the Panoramio site, with much useful data, prior to it going away. So in the earlier post, if I shared this image:

Camp Saffran - US Mail drop

That link will give a "Thanks for stopping by" dead page when accessed. Fortunately, http://www.panoramio.com/photo/25164491 is easily read as including a record ID # ( 25164491 ) that can be used to find the same page as it was, in the archives, like:

https://web.archive.org/web/20161014002503/http://www.panoramio.com/photo/25164491

This transforms into:

https://web.archive.org/web/20161013193141/http://www.panoramio.com/photo/25164491

Using whatever glue code moves the time machine pointer to the right capture time. Panoramio pages were only archived once, it seems, but as nothing changed after the site freeze the inventory should be valid.

And ta-da! The USPS ghost truck will be by to pickup those camp post cards home.