GeoNames Forum

Hi,

I just started using gpsPhoto.pl to tag photos of a recent trip. I was tagging about 2000 photos, and everything was working well. After a while, though, all of the 'place' information quit coming in. I looked into the Perl script and into some net queries, and found that geonames was the service providing the information.

The format of the query was:

http://ws.geonames.org/findNearbyWikipedia?lat=-35.1869833333333&lng=150.623348888889&maxRows=1&radius=20

Looking at the fetched information, it returned the following (I've masked part of the IP address with X's):

<geonames>
<status message="the hourly limit of 20000 requests for the IP address XX.XXX.97.158 has been exceeded. Please throttle your requests or use the commercial service." value="19"/>
</geonames>

After seeing that, I figured that perhaps my gpsPhoto.pl script had overused the system, although I didn't see how I had possibly reached 20000 requests in an hour. None the less, I waited a while before trying again. Trying an hour later, I still got the same error. Trying the next day, I still got the same error.

Is this error message sent as a 'default' message when there are problems? Have I really overused the system so badly that it won't let me use it any more?

Thanks for any help.

BrookB

Hi Brook

This is weird. Do you still have any problems?
What I have seen in the logfiles is that you are querying the same lat/lng over and over again. Could there be an endless loop on your end?

Marc

Hello Marc,

Things seem to be OK now. A short while after I posted, things started working again. I don't know why.

Regarding my 'seeming' to be querying the same location again and again, there are probably a few reasons for that.

1) I was trying to debug the gpsPhoto.pl script. If it got part way through the directory full of photos, and a query didn't work (which could be due to a network timeout or something), the whole script would die, and I'd have to start over. When I restrarted, it would requery all the same photos again (as it was building a Google Earth track log as well as tagging the photos). So since I couldn't seem to ever get through the photo list without the software dieing on at least one photo, I went into the Perl script and edited it so that if it failed, it would re-try that query rather than dieing. Since I've never written Perl before, there was a little trial and error there. So I got a list of just a few files, and did my debugging with those. And those few files were probably queried many times over and over - but probably not more than 100 queries total. But before I 'fixed' the script, it probably got through several hundred photos before one would die, and I'd have to start it over again. That added up to quite a few although they weren't all of the same point.

2) Sometimes I'd take a lot of photos from one location. My camera makes two copies (Raw and JPG), so there are at least two of each. And many times it will associate the same GPS track log lon/lat point with several photos. For example, at the Fox Glacier in New Zealand, I took a panorama photo with over 100 shots from a single point. So those will all register as the same point being queried over and over again. I wish the software was 'smart' enough to figure out which photos shared the same lon and lat, and only query once for that lon and lat, but it isn't that smart, and I'm not yet smart enough in Perl to re-write the software to give it those kinds of smarts.

You can check out the software I'm using that uses your web site at http://www.carto.net/projects/photoTools/gpsPhoto/

I will post again if I run into additional problems.

Thanks for the great web site and tool!

Brook

Well, it looks like the problem came back. While I was writing the last posting, I had gpsPhoto.pl running. A little while after I posted, I noticed that all of the place info was no longer being retrieved. Sure enough, the same "Hourly Limit" message was coming in. This photo directory had about 1500 photos in it from New Zealand, and it took about an hour to run through those, so that's only 1 photo (and I would assume 1 query, although I'm not sure of that) every 3 seconds or so. I don't know how I would have gotten to 20000 accesses in an hour. But I'm locked out again. . .

Please let me know if you can figure anything out, and also, how many accesses are really being requested from my IP. Perhaps this software is querying more than once per photo.

Thanks,

Brook