Map style for the Geotaggers' World Atlas

I made the vector tiles for this with this pipeline:

cat grand-unified.list.sort3 | /data2/data/github/geotools/cleanse | /data2/data/github/geotools/plot-motion 2>/dev/null | ./geo2geojson | /data2/data/github/tippecanoe/tippecanoe -pf -pl -po -z13 -r1.5 -f -o geotaggers1.5pflo.mbtiles

using this repository and tools from from geotools and tippecanoe.

The quick walkthrough:

• grand-unified.list.sort3 is a list of photo locations in user date time lat,lon etc format, sorted with sort so that photos from the same person are adjacent, and are sorted in chronological order
• cleanse strips out points with exact duplicate locations and with near-duplicate locations from the same person
• plot-motion takes pairs of locations from the same person and calculates the distance and speed between them.
• geo2geojson (in this repo) converts that format to geojson, and trims out pairs that are too far separated in time, distance, or speed to be meaningful for this visualization.
• tippecanoe converts geojson into Mapbox vector tiles. The options are:
  • -pf: Don't limit the tiles to 200K features
  • -pl: At low zooms, drop some fraction of lines, not just points
  • -po: Don't reorder features to put ones with the same properties together
  • -z13: Use zoom level 13 as the base
  • -r1.5: Retain 1/1.5 of the features at each lower zoom instead of the usual 1/2.5
  • -f: Force overwrite of old .mbtiles file
  • -o whatever.mbtiles: Name the output file that the tiles are written into

Once you have the .mbtiles file of vector tiles, you can upload it to Mapbox and then use Mapbox Studio to apply a style like the one in style.mss.

The key things that the style is doing are:

• Increasing the line thickness at zoom levels higher than the base (and also again at especially low zoom levels because the few dense spots get hard to see)
• Using lighter and lighter opacities for points that are further and further away
• Coloring the lines according to the travel speed

It also contains a style for Mapbox Streets for the base map, doing similar things with line thickness.

cat grand-unified.list.sort.20170615 |
/data2/data/github/geotools/cleanse |
/data2/data/github/geotools/plot-motion 2>/dev/null |
./geo2geojson |
/data2/data/github/tippecanoe/tippecanoe -ae -zg -pf --drop-fraction-as-needed -f -o geotaggers20170615.mbtiles