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

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!

Activation complete.