Google Maps Address Formatter

I wrote this script while I was working at a roofing company. You probably won’t want to hear this particular truth, but part of our job was to scout out all the neighborhoods in the area and catalogue the houses with roof damage; for example, missing shingles. Those addresses end up getting sent to a big database where call centers find the phone number of the owner and pester the residents about getting roof repairs. Not the proudest work I’ve done.

Back to the point, because it was exhausting spending excessive time documenting and formatting these addresses off-hours, I created a script that does most of the work. In Google Maps, you may know you can tap a house to create a temporary pin with either the address or precise coordinates. I took screenshots of each pin, drawing a symbol marking what kind of damage. When I got home from work, I would transfer the photos to my computer and dump them in a folder. The script would pull the addresses, run them through the Google geolocator API, format them the appropriate way, and then create a text file with each address listed. Simple, but helpful.

To improve upon this script and make it more general, at some point I’d like to create a UI that let you choose what parts of the screenshot go where and how to have it formatted. This will only be valuable for someone with several similar images with variable text.