Automation of geotagged photo documentation visualization in QGIS: connecting heritage science research with applied informatics education

This paper addresses the efficient visualization of spatial data in Heritage Science, specifically geotagged photographic documentation. It presents the development of the SurveyWebMap Exporter plugin for the open‑source QGIS platform. This tool was created through collaboration between the Institute of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics of the Czech Academy of Sciences and an Applied Informatics student during a professional internship. The aim was to automate the import, processing and web publishing of field data, with an emphasis on visualizing the camera viewing direction (azimuth) and producing a portable offline web map without server infrastructure. The paper describes the technical solution, the use of Python libraries for EXIF metadata processing, and the educational contribution of this collaboration in the context of project‑based learning.