Convert lat/lon to zipcode / neighborhood name

Question

I have a large collection of pictures with GPS locations, encoded as lat/lon coordinates, mostly in Los Angeles. I would like to convert these to (1) zipcodes, and (2) neighborhood names. Are there any free web services or databases to do so?

The best I can come up with so far is scrape the neighborhood polygons from the LA times page and try to find out in which polygon every coordinate is. However this might be quite a lot of work, and not all of my coordinates are in LA. As for the zipcodes, this 2004 database is the best I can find, however zipcodes are encoded as a single coordinates instead of a polygon. So the best I can do is find the minimum distance from a given coordinate to the given zipcode-coordinates, which is not optimal.

I was under the impression that google-maps or open-street-maps should be able to do this (as they seem to 'know' exactly where every neighboorhood and zipcode is), however I cannot find any API's to do the lookups / queries.

Answer 1

You can now do this directly within R itself thanks to the rather awesome ggmap package.

Like others mention, you'll be reverse geocoding using the google maps API (and therefore limited to 2,500 queries daily), but it's as simple as:

library("ggmap")

# generate a single example address
lonlat_sample <- as.numeric(geocode("the hollyood bowl"))
lonlat_sample  # note the order is longitude, latitiude

res <- revgeocode(lonlat_sample, output="more")
# can then access zip and neighborhood where populated
res$postal_code
res$neighborhood