In the middle of preparing an article speculating what Apple and Google are up to with Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently joining Apple's board, I decided to poke around iPhoto to see if one of my suspicions held water.

And much to my pleasant surprise, I found concrete evidence that the two companies are up to something!

Just look at these screenshots!

In the Localizable.strings file inside the iPhoto app bundle, we find several intriguing keys, including one called GPSMapURL which is preset to "http://maps.google.com/maps?q=%f+%f"!



Opening up the iPhoto's InfoPanel.nib file, a hidden Show button is right next to the GPS fields.



And lastly, going through the iPhoto executable itself with a Hex Editor, I managed to unearth more than 70 references to GPS! (e.g. gpsAltitude, gpsEorWLongitude, gpsLongitudeSeconds, showGPS, updateGPSInfo and mGPSShowButton)

The GPS fields in iPhoto is not exactly earth-shattering news. GPS EXIF info has been in iPhoto for a while now. But the inclusion of Google Maps and the hidden Show button certainly is.

Now, with the help of the free ExifTool, I managed to add some GPS EXIF information to an existing photo in my library. And sure enough, when I imported it into iPhoto, Get Info displayed the GPS coordinates properly. (Can you guess where the picture was taken?)



It took some trial and error but I found out that I had to set the following GPS EXIF fields to get iPhoto to display the coordinates - GPSLatitudeRef, GPSLatitude, GPSLongitudeRef, GPSLongitude, GPSAltitudeRef, GPSAltitude, GPSTimeStamp and GPSDateStamp.

However, even with some creative hacking in iPhoto's preferences files (com.apple.iPhoto.plist) using several keys like ShowMap, ShowGPS, EnableMaps, etc., etc. I still couldn't get the Show button to activate though.

Hhhmmmm.... so what is Apple and Google up to?

Could geo-tagged pictures be just the tip of the iceberg?

I think so, and I'll show you why when we finally publish the article that made me poke around iPhoto in the first place!