Edvininpolku

This page serves two purposes, firstly to visually document the Edvininpolku sculpture park in Vaasa, Finland created by Edvin Hevonkoski that I visited in 2009 and secondly to allow me to experiment with web programming.

I had originally uploaded this set of geo-tagged photographs to Panaramio however following its acquistion by Google the service was shuttered in 2016. As I had gone to the effort of geotagging the photographs, it seemed a shame for them not be available and I had a couple of ideas how to make it a more interactive experience.

The photographs are all stored on GitHub in a branch of the repository that stores the source code of this website and from where I host this site using GitHub Pages. The source code of this site is made freely available to all under the MIT License.

Each of the photographs presented here are roughly 10MB and have the co-coordinates of where they were taken encoded within their EXIF metadata. This site is largely generated dynamically on the client-side, except for this static content and that which is used for Search Engine Optimisation. On loading the page, the browser makes a call to the GitHub API to query which photos are available in the directory, each photo is then downloaded and Web Workers are then dispatched to parse the EXIF metadata from the photographs, this is then used to generate a map of the sculpture park. Due to out of order execution, we have to wait until all photos have been processed, at which point they are sorted into chronological order and a path is drawn around the park on the map. The page is then populated with each photo, and as the user scrolls through the photos their corresponding marker is highlighted on the map.