Basically you want to automate the process of creating a quadrilateral with geo-coordinates as corners and stretching a texture image onto it.
It is good that coordinates can be stored as metadata in an image file. Geotiff doesn’t seem to use the more common EXIF tags, but is an older standard.
For SketchUp, there are two limitations for making this useful:
- maximum texture size: aerial imagery probably tends to use larger image sizes than textures in 3D graphics
- projection: Textures use a perspective projection, but GeoTiff can specify a plethora of non-linear projections that cannot be accurately represented (without doing image processing first). Also, GeoTiff supports many coordinate systems, whereas SketchUp’s API supports some.
A plugin would need to do the following:
- Read out metadata e.g. using ExifTool. It seems the metadata does not specify coordinates of image corners but of the center and projection parameters. So you need a geographic math library to calculate the geo-coordinates of the image corners.
- Then use SketchUp’s API to convert geo-coordinates to model coordinates and draw a quadrilateral face.
- Then create a texture from the image file and map UV coordinates on the quadrilateral.