Volunteers Map Crowdsourced Photos for Disasters Affecting the United States

Overview

The PhotoMappers project is in its 10th year of providing situational awareness to federal, state, and local emergency managers through crowdsourced photo geolocation during disasters. 

As in past years, PhotoMappers continues to be a collaboration between GISCorps, NAPSG Foundation, and CEDR Digital Corps. NAPSG Foundation hosts the PhotoMappers applications and serves as the principal point of contact for emergency managers at the federal, state and local levels. NAPSG staff field activation requests and remain in frequent communication with emergency responders throughout each activation, passing along areas of focus and concern to the PhotoMappers team. CEDR Digital Corps are the social media experts, contributing automated social media search tools and promoting the PhotoMappers effort on social media. GISCorps, in turn, fields and manages a large team of mapping volunteers. These volunteers scour social media for relevant photos of on-the-ground conditions, geolocate each photo as precisely as possible, and upload it to the map using a Survey123 form embedded in a custom Volunteer Portal built in Experience Builder. The GISCorps Admin Team vets each photo for locational accuracy and adds a primary lifeline and a preliminary building damage score where appropriate. Each GISCorps PhotoMappers activation is managed by members of the GISCorps Disaster Response Subcommittee.

Emergency managers and first responders can view and filter the vetted photos on interactive maps and dashboards, getting an at-a-glance sense of each storm’s impacts to the communities they serve. These applications, as well as the raw data, are publicly available on NAPSG’s PhotoMappers Hub Site.

Activations

Hurricane Melissa

On Sunday, October 26, 2025, NAPSG requested the PhotoMappers Admin Team activate at the request of the Jamaican government in preparation for Hurricane Melissa. Two days later, when Hurricane Melissa made landfall near New Hope on Jamaica’s southwest coast, the activation was opened up to the rest of the PhotoMappers team. Despite limited street views and a new area of interest, 6 PhotoMapper Admins and 32 volunteers geolocated and uploaded 168 images during the five-day activation. The data collected supported critical operations on the ground such as providing context to search and rescue teams for their deployments and overall situational awareness.     

2025 Central Texas Floods

On Saturday, July 5, 2025, the State of Texas requested PhotoMappers activate in response to severe flooding in parts of the hill country.  Due to cloud cover, larger imagery efforts were delayed and PhotoMappers bridged the gap to provide situational awareness for emergency managers.  Over the next several days, 86 photos were mapped and vetted through combined efforts of nine team members. 

Mapping volunteers for this mission included Brad Fisher, Cara Maney, Hannah Gonzales-Bridges, Holly Torpey, Jessica Cook, Keith Johnson, Mackenzie Fox, Nick, and Tari Martin.  The mission was led by Holly Torpey and Hannah Gonzales-Bridges with additional support from Katie Picchione and Emma Montague.     

April Severe Weather

On April 3, 2025, PhotoMappers received an activation request from NAPSG due to tornado outbreaks and ongoing flood threats throughout the Midwestern United States. Over the course of four days, the PhotoMapper Admin Team along with some key volunteers were able to map over 360 photos. Their work improved situational awareness to both emergency responders and decision makers across multiple states. Thank you to the 15 volunteers who were able to jump in and support this mission!