Someone went looking for a tiny tool I made years ago
A note from someone who missed my small Google Maps to Adobe Bridge converter was a lovely reminder that useful, personal tools can travel further than expected.
Years ago, I made a tiny coordinate converter mostly for my own pleasure. I had a Google Maps coordinate, an Adobe Bridge metadata field and a small but persistent irritation: the values could not be moved from one to the other one-to-one.
The mathematical conversion was modest. The satisfaction came from removing that repeated annoyance with a little page I had made myself. It was personal, slightly quirky and never intended to become a major product.
You can open the current GPS Coordinate Converter in Kebman Lab now. The reason it has a new home is more human than technical.
The useful little version from 2019
Google Maps presented latitude and longitude as signed decimal degrees. My Adobe Bridge workflow expected degrees and decimal minutes with hemisphere letters. Converting the values by hand was tedious and easy to mistype, especially when I was adding location metadata to several photographs.
So I made a browser page that split the decimal number, calculated the minutes and produced separate values for Bridge. It did the small job I wanted it to do. Like many personal web experiments, it carried assumptions from my own use: the first version always wrote north and west because those were the examples in front of me.
The page eventually disappeared as kebman.com changed. I did not think of that as removing a product from the market. In my mind, a small experiment had simply gone quiet with the rest of an older site.
Then someone went looking for it
Years later, an anonymous person wrote to tell me he had been looking for the converter and could no longer find it. I will not publish his name, address or message, but I can say what the note did to me: it genuinely delighted me.
A thing I had made to resolve my own frustration had been useful in somebody else's workflow. That is a wonderful result for a small tool. It also changed the obvious next step. I no longer wanted to put the old file back unchanged; I wanted to rebuild it properly while keeping the directness that made it useful.
Small tools do not need to become large products to matter. Sometimes removing one recurring irritation is enough.
What the new converter does differently
The current version begins with the same task and corrects the old assumptions around it. It now:
- derives N, S, E and W from the actual sign of each coordinate;
- calculates southern and western values from their absolute magnitude, so negative coordinates remain correct;
- validates latitude and longitude ranges before producing a result;
- accepts decimal degrees, degrees and decimal minutes, and degrees/minutes/seconds;
- reads recognised Google Maps URLs containing coordinates;
- offers a bounded batch mode for up to 100 coordinate pairs;
- provides explicit copy actions and a downloadable CSV;
- performs every conversion locally in the browser.
The last point matters. The converter does not send the coordinate text to Kebman, an analytics endpoint or a map service. Google Maps and OpenStreetMap links are created only after a valid conversion, and nothing is opened until the user chooses a link.
It also shows normalised decimal degrees, degrees and decimal minutes, degrees/minutes/seconds, and the separate Adobe Bridge latitude and longitude values. That makes the result easier to inspect instead of asking the user to trust one opaque transformation.
Thank you for noticing a small thing
To the person who went looking for the old converter: thank you. Your note was specific, generous and unexpectedly encouraging. It reminded me that a web page can quietly remain part of somebody else's way of working long after its maker has moved on.
And thank you to everyone who enjoys the small, useful and slightly quirky things I make. They may begin with my own curiosity or irritation, but they become more meaningful when they help someone else.