Blog posts tagged geocoding

Building a custom Placeholder geocoding database

Placeholder is great but there are three things it doesn’t support by default which are pretty important for SFO Museum: The inclusion of airports, historical records and SFO Museum architectural records in the search index. I am happy to say that we are now able to build our own custom Placeholder SQLite databases which address all of these issues.

This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on April 28, 2025 and tagged golang, placeholder, geocoding and history.

Geotagging at SFO Museum: Protomaps, search and reverse-geocoding

The bad news is that, when you look closely, there really are that many moving pieces when it comes to something like geotagging photos. The good news is that nearly all of those moving pieces, from the underlying data to the tools to operate on those data, are within the reach of cultural heritage as low-cost and open-source alternatives to the commercial offerings. We may still need to stitch those pieces together to meet the needs of a specific institution but at least they are within reach now.

This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on May 03, 2021 and tagged golang, geotagging, whosonfirst, geocoding, reverse-geocoding, placeholder and maps.

Using the Placeholder Geocoder at SFO Museum

This is a long and technical blog post. The short version is: It is now easy, possible and inexpensive to install and operate a “coarse” geocoding service, with global coverage, support for multiple languages and stable permanent identifiers using openly licensed data, both locally and in ☁️ the cloud ☁️. We’ve made some additional tools to complement this reality and waded through some of the muck of modern software development so you don’t have to.

This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on November 04, 2019 and tagged aws, geo, geocoding, pelias, placeholder, sfo and whosonfirst.