Determining the camera direction of a geotagged image

Question

Is there an easy way to determine the camera direction of a geotagged image? Maybe there are several methods for this.

Answer 1

It depends on the camera that captured the image: The camera has to have a sensor capable of capturing the direction, and it has to record that data when it captures a photo. Whether the image is geotagged is not relevant.

When a digital camera captures an image, it stores metadata about the image in the EXIF tags (text data embedded in the image file). There are EXIF tags which store the latitude and longitude of an image (Exif.GPSInfo.GPSLatitude and Exif.GPSInfo.GPSLongitude). The term 'geotag' refers to the data in those EXIF tags. There is also a tag which stores the direction the camera was pointing, Exif.GPSInfo.GPSImgDirection.

However, not all cameras save all the EXIF data about an image. Sometimes that's because the camera manufacturer just doesn't care enough (or think their customers care enough) to record all the metadata. It can also be because the camera doesn't have the sensors necessary to actually capture a given piece of metadata, for example an older budget digital camera with no location sensor would not save the Lat/Long info.

So, you will want to look at the images' EXIF data and see if the Direction tag is populated. If it's not, then there's no easy way to determine the images' direction. Depending on how important it is, you can of course use the geotag info to locate the photo in the real world, then manually cross-reference other imagery to figure out the direction the camera was pointing. But that's definitely not easy if you have lots of images.

Answer 2

If this information is stored in the image's metadata (e.g. EXIF data), you could display the information e.g. using https://www.gimp.org/.

Just open the image with GIMP and choose from the menu bar: Image → Metadata

Depending on the OS and the standard image viewer you are using, you could try if this standard viewer is also able to display the image's metadata (e.g. right click and show image information or something like this...)