Convert addresses into coordinate

Question

How do I convert a large number of addresses (with street address, city and street number) in coordinates (latitude and longitude)?

... without having to do one at a time? Is there any script?

Answer 1

It sounds like what you're looking for is geocoding — taking an address and converting it to its corresponding latitude and longitude coordinates. If you have all your addresses in a list, you can use a service that offers batch processing so you don't have to upload addresses one at a time. Alternatively, you could process each address by looping through a script (one at a time, but super-fast); for that, you'd want a service that offers an API to let you work through addresses programmatically.

You'll get more accurate results from geocoding if you can standardize and validate the addresses first — basically, just make sure that the addresses are real by comparing them to a known set of valid data. This is where my expertise comes in; I work at SmartyStreets.

There are several different services you could use for geocoding, and each one will give you slightly different results. The best geocoding data seems to come from GoogleMaps and Bing, but their Terms of Service prohibit you from storing their geocodes or using the data for anything other than displaying on their maps. Here's a good explanation of the quality you'll likely find with geocoding data in general: http://smartystreets.com/kb/faq/how-accurate-is-your-geocoding-data

SmartyStreets specializes in validating and geocoding addresses. We offer a service called LiveAddress, which lets you upload your list of addresses or use our API, and we'll process them & return tons of data — including latitude and longitude. It's super-fast and provides you with more information about each address.

A few notes: This isn't a totally free option for lots of addresses, but the price is probably the best you'll find for this type of service. SmartyStreets (and thus LiveAddress for Lists) is only able to give information for US addresses, as well; so if you're looking to geocode addresses world-wide, we wouldn't be able to help with all of them.

Like I said, there are lots of services you can use to get geocode data. I would suggest looking at some of the different options and finding whichever one is most useful to you. A Google search with terms like "address validation" will give you a good list of options to choose from.