Oh by the way, I did a little more digging in iPhoto, there are references to setGPSLatitude and _updateGPSInfo, which is a much bigger sign of some advance in GPS coding. It's easy to read the data and link to Google Maps, it's harder to fetch and insert the data. It'll wipe out the need for my little add-ons, but I'd really like to see an official Apple solution.

It turns out that iPhoto reads the GPS coordinates properly on PowerPC machines but not on Intel Macs.

I sent my test pic to my iMac G5 and it displayed the expected coords.

Just to be sure, I even reinstalled iPhoto on my MBP to make sure that I didn't accidentally corrupt it while I was poking around but the coordinates were still not being displayed properly.

That's an odd result. I don't have a MacTel to test it on myself, but as far as I know the tagged images I have sent to an iMacTel have been working fine. I'll check again to confirm it because I can't explain why it would only be going wrong on one machine.

Here's some pretty compelling proof that iPhoto is doing something iffy, there really shouldn't be that many seconds, it should roll over to minutes once it reaches 60. Pity that, fingers crossed the uptick in GPS interest will make the fix higher priority for iPhoto 6.0.6

Attached Images

Picture 5.jpg (11.8 KB, 906 views)

And I also revisited my original post about the iPhoto EXIF decoding bugs.

And yes, there is definitely a bug there. I didn't encode the GPS coords wrong after all. The rational number data entry scheme applies to EXIV2. I used ExifTools to encode mine.

To be sure, I compiled a copy of Exiv2 and then have it read the coords of my test pic with the ExifTools encoded coordinates and they matched.

When I fired up iPhoto on my MBP, both versions displayed the wrong coords.

The strange thing though is both the Exiv2 and ExifTools encoded versions of the picture showed the GPS coords fine on my iMac G5.

Its Bug ID# 4775336 at radar.apple.com. But forget about finding it.

I hate to go off on a tangent here, but I just wish Apple uses something like Bugzilla instead of their own WebObjects-based bug-reporting system.

The current one is just too clunky and restrictive and doesn't promote "more eyeballs" looking at existing bug reports.

It didn't allow me to search existing bug reports and it only allowed me to create and track my own reports and nobody else's.

Here's another data point that may be useful. I have some photos taken with a GPS enabled Ricoh Caplio Pro G3 camera. The camera wrote the GPS EXIF data into the file so it has more data than I would have encoded manually (such as speed and which satellites were locked in) and doesn't have human errors from me.

I have attached a test photo in case anyone wants it for experiments. The only processing on the file was to reduce the size in Photoshop so it would be small enough for the upload limits here.

I loaded that picture into iPhoto version 4 or 5 back when I was running a PowerPC Mac. That iPhoto library has now been migrated to an Intel Mac. The lat/lon for it displays correctly in iPhoto on the Intel Mac as 42.00 22.00' 13.68"N, 88.00 59.00' 40.57" W. However, none of my photos seem to show anything for altitude other than 1.00 m (or -1.00 m if there is no altitude recorded.)

If I take that same photo file and load it into iPhoto again on the Intel Mac, it changes the lat/lon displayed to 42.00 22.00' 0.88"N, 88.00 59.00' 2.17" W, which has incorrect seconds.

iPhoto doesn't seem to modify the file. I can open the imported file in another application and the EXIF data seems to be fine. So iPhoto may be storing the GPS info somewhere on import.

I tried all of this with an unmodified iPhoto.

Attached Images

GPS test Caplio ps.jpg (38.1 KB, 899 views)

Doug,
Thanks for the test picture. This should really help with testing iPhoto GPS support.

The more I look into it, the more I suspect that iPhoto's engineers are still working hard on this one. There are just too many bugs even with the official GPS EXIF display on the Info Panel.

And one more data point, Samac's Mac Mini, which still has iPhoto 6.0.4 released June 20 of this year, also has the hidden Google Maps Show button with the same GPS decoding problems which leaves me to believe that the GPS code has been sitting fallow for a while.

Here's hoping that our accidental discovery bumps up GPS support for iPhoto 7 come MacWorld '07.

As somone who imm. recognized where that photo was taken I can add a little information. I've lived in Cape May for nearly 20 yrs and the location of the photo was, until recently, 3-4 years ago right at the high water mark. thereby making it both on and offshore dep[ending upon the time of day. Hope that is of interest. Also please get in touch the next time you're in the area.

Hi Barec2!
My wife and I were there Memorial Day Weekend and just had a blast! Cape May was really a treat, even with the huge crowd that descended on the town.
Perhaps you might have seen us, - we were the couple on the Segway .

And staying on topic, I even had my Garmin Quest mounted on the Seg and the tandem bike we rented all weekend. Its a shame I didn't keep the GPS track though since it would have been a great way to test and demo geocoding.