One word: awesome. I wonder if you’d be able to access Google Earth’s api via LR and use that for geotagging – it’s pretty awesome, fast and from what I can tell pretty simple to fetch gps coords/info from it. Not sure how this would work with the LR plugin structure but this would be super awesome

Thanks for all your hard work.

I’ve looked around and haven’t seen any way to tie them together, but apparently, with a simple Google Earth plugin like this you can enable a “copy location to clipboard” functionality, which you should –in theory– be able to paste into my plugin. —Jeffrey

I have little problem with that (awesome) plugin. A have a gpx file that covers date 2008-08-15 from around 10:00 to 19:00. I have pictures (Nikon NEF) that were taken on that day. In lightroom metadata viewer (metadata set: All) i have three dates that describe my example picture:
Date Time Original: 2008-08-15 14:14:42
Date Time Digitized: 2008-08-15 14:14:42
Date Time: 2008-08-16 00:55:03

When i switch to Default metadata set i can see capture time:
Capture Time: 14:14:42
15 August 2008

The problem is when i try to geoencode that picture with my gpx file. At the top of the geoencode form there is a text: “Selected: one image dated aug 16, 2008 12:55%p” and at the bottom: “Tracklog does not cover any of the selected images”. Obviusly the plugin does not use the correct capture time (Date Time Original). It uses the time that describes the moment when i copied the files from my camera to computer (Date Time).

I use Lightroom 2.1 on Windows Vista

I think this is fixed in version .8 —Jeffrey

Hi Jeffrey,

I did try to edit the LRTEMPLATE file but it looks like I’m missing something. Here’s what I did:

“com.adobe.country”,
“com.adobe.isoCountryCode”,
“com.adobe.separator”,
“info.regex.lightroom.gps.Location”,

Hi Jeffrey,

It looks like you might not be reading the best parameter for Google Maps URLs. If the URL has a ‘latlng’, then you can use the first two parts of the comma separated value list (with appropriate decimal places), rather than the value it looks like you’re using (sll?).

This gives you the lat/long of the business listing (ie, copy the URL for the ‘more info’ link, or a link generated by clicking the “Link” link on the top right of the page). Otherwise you end up setting the lat/long to the centre of the viewport, not the business listing’s URL.

I’m pretty sure that I want the center of the currently-displayed map in all situations, but am open to discussion about it. I’d think it’d be more confusing than not for it to be anything else. I’ll see whether I can document it more clearly… —Jeffrey

Looks like the “line 12415″ error happens on photos when I was standing still for a long time. My GPS (Garmin Colorado) only saves trackpoints while moving.

Jeffrey, would it be possible to implement a “120 seconds” OR “50 meters” setting?

Workaround: increase the “fuzziness” parameter, if you’re sure you were recording tracks when the photo was taken. I had to increase up to 1000(s) for some photos, but it avoids the “line 12415″ error.

Your suggestion is not a workaround… it’s exactly what “fuzziness” is for (so it’s a good suggestion ). If you get the error again with .11 or later, could you please let me know (citing, please, the full error message and the exact version you see it in)? Thanks. —Jeffrey

Hi Jeffrey,
I’m still struggling to make this work in my environment.

A couple of problems:-

1) When I select a track log (Magellan) that has 2000 points; the Plugin indicates it can find only 29 points in the file.
I’ve successfully loaded the track into Google Earth so it looks like it’s 1/2 way reasonable.

2) When trying to encode my pics for that file I still get error messages along the line of

+61.2: At line 12567: 12692; attempt to index a nil value.
The process seems to hang on picture 225 of 251.

I’ happy to send the tracklog if that will halp.

Oh, and I’m on version…11

Regaards
Leonard.

Thanks to the tracklog you sent, I was able to fix these (version .12 has the fixes). Thanks. —Jeffrey

Something really weird just happened.

I had closed Lightroom up after I sent you the last message. I had a file open in Photoshop that I saved and then closed Photoshop. I reopened Lightroom to ensure that my photo was back in Lightroom and performed a Read Metafile from File operation. It took a long time processing and was going back reading several photos. When this was finished it ALL the photos I had tried to write back yesterday were tagged.

Yesterday, I had tried the read metafile several times before I was (prematurely) sure that the GPS data was “lost.”

I have just performed a Lightroom Catalog Relaunch and Optimize operation and the Geotags are still there.

Ina

Hi Jeffrey,
any plans to expand beyond gpx files? I use an amod agl3080 for tracking my routes and it produces a .log file in nmea0183 format. I know this can be converted to gpx but would great if your plugin supported it directly.

thanks, appreciate the great work you do.

Ben

Yes, of course, I’ll probably embed GPSBabel into the plugin eventually. Have been ultra crazy busy lately, as my blog and the plugin update history perhaps hints at —Jeffrey

Thanks for this great plugin!
I tested Lightroom one year ago and I found it very useful for the whole task of photo management. But I dont understand why such a professional (and expensive) tool cannot handle geotagging, for me this is essential. So I decided to go one with a set of free apps: RawShooter Essentials, GeoSetter, Picasa, Adobe DNG Converter, …
But with your plugin the situation has changed.
Thx again from Italy.

Hi Jeffrey:

I have been using your GeoSetter extensively now for the last few weeks. I have only used the Static geotagging. I have not encountered any further errors, so far. However, I do have a couple of enhancement suggestions that would save time and hassle:

1. Allow the input box to remain open until the user says “done.” In other words, allow both geocoding and writing back shadow data wihout the pluglet automatically closing between steps. I always geoencode and then immediately write shadow data back.

It’s on the to-do list to include a “write back shadow data to file” checkbox to the geoencoding tabs.

2. Have an option to write the reverse location, city, state, country and country data back to the metadata. Perhaps a checkbox to select which of the metadata one would want to write back.

That’s also on the to-do list, once I can find a good source of data. I currently put reverse geocode data from Google as information in some places, but it’s much to spotty to rely on. —Jeffrey

Thanks so much for a great applet and great support.

Ina

Jeffrey:

Re: “Is the “(to enable this option, see the “Write data back” tab and its associated warnings and instructions)” note somehow insufficient?”

If you first look at the Geocoding page , there is the box asking you if want to wirte back data. By default, it is greyed out and there is no instruction on that page telling the user how to activate the box.

Ina

Jeffry, I have been trying to find a way to manually geotag my photos in Light Room and ran across your plugin. It is a great idea but when I manually put in the coordinates like this +28° 25′ 13.71″, -81° 35′ 5.11″ and press the button to geotag the photo I get this error message ?:1280:bad argument #1 to ‘?’ (number excpected, got nil). I am using LR 2.0 Am I doing something wrong? Can you help? Thanks.

That should work, and does for me. Are you using the latest version of the plugin? (You’re not using the latest version of Lightroom…. why?)
By the way, it’s “Lightroom” and not “Light Room”. —Jeffrey

Hi Jeffrey, I’ve just updated to the last version (20081204.23) and when I try to “View location at Google earth” get the following error:

‘Attempt to access property “url” that’s not declared in Info.lua’

César.

Oops, sorry about that. I just pushed .24 that fixes it. Thanks for the report! —Jeffrey

First, your plugins are great. I wouldn’t be using LR if it weren’t for them.

I found an issue with this one however, (.26) it seems the popup window is too large for my screen. I’m using a 12″ 1024 x 768 screen (its on my PowerBook G4), and I can’t cancel the plugin window. I’m assuming that there is a cancel button below the geocode images button. If there is, it is too far down for be to access.

Been playing around a lot with the plug-in and seemed to have found an issue. When I try to sync the GPS Support data between two images, the GPS data does not seem to move to the new image. I have selected the images correctly and the one with the data is highlighted as primary. I right click and go into the Metadata>Sync Metadata interface. I select the GPS Support and have the fields checked. Hit Synchronize and nothing happens. Well just thought I would let you know. Thanks much.

Lightroom doesn’t allow you to sync GPS data that way. If you want to sync the shadow data that my plugin deals with, you can do so in its Geoencode dialog, selecting “Geoencode Static Location” and then use the [import location from active image] to plugin in the data that will be applied to all the other images. —Jeffrey

Hi Jeffery,

I’m having a problem geoencoding images on my EeePC, I dont seem to have the “Begin” button under the tracklog tab. Would it be something to do with my screen only supporrting 1024×600(724)?

Mark

Just installed your GPS and Flickr plugins a couple of days ago. Went to use them today and say the “New Version Available” text, so I went in to plugin manager, and tried to install the new versions by clicking on “Upgrade Now”. The debugging immediately ungrayed, and when I looked at the log file, here’s the gist of the errors I’m getting:

Execution/debug log for Jeffrey’s gps plugin for Lightroom, version 20081227.31
Log started December 28, 2008 05:47PM local
December 29, 2008 09:47AM JST
Plugin folder: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2\Plugins\gps-jfriedl.lrplugin
Lightroom version 2.2.0 build 523352 for Windows (Locale: en).
———————————————————————————————-

At line 1884: before trap
+0.0: At line 13081: in ShowUpgradeDialog
+0.0: At line 12844: in unzip_cmd()
+87.1: At line 1884: before trap
+87.1: At line 13081: in ShowUpgradeDialog
+87.1: At line 12844: in unzip_cmd()
+89.5: At line 1884: before trap
+89.5: At line 13081: in ShowUpgradeDialog
+89.5: At line 12844: in unzip_cmd()

And for Flickr Uploader:

Execution/debug log for Jeffrey’s flickr plugin for Lightroom, version 20081224.62
Log started December 28, 2008 05:53PM local
December 29, 2008 09:53AM JST
Plugin folder: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2\Plugins\flickr-jfriedl.lrplugin
Lightroom version 2.2.0 build 523352 for Windows (Locale: en).
———————————————————————————————-

+768.8: At line 1889: before trap
+0.0: At line 22569: in ShowUpgradeDialog
+0.0: At line 22332: in unzip_cmd()

BTW: these both seem to be dieing around a ‘zip’ command. I do not have WinZip. I have WinRAR, which handles all of my zipping and unzipping needs. Could this be part of the problem?

Thanks for cool tools!

PS: I’m looking forward to the feature that will upgrade Headlines, Captions, Keywords, and other Metadata on Flickr without having to re-upload the files!

Hi Jeffrey,

thanks for your great pluggin, i really love it!!!

i just noticed on pictures geoencoded by other means (geosetter) and imported to lightroom, the geodata shows up in the exif, and there’s a neat link right there to open google maps at location.
would this be hard to have this with your plugin ? could be a nice addition.

anyways thanks a lot for your pluggins !

Alex

Only “real” GPS data gets the direct link (to Google Maps if you click, or to Yahoo! Maps if you ALT-click). This is a basic (and unfortunate) limitation of the plugin architecture. If you convert the shadow data to real data (via writing back, then reading metadata), you’ll get the clickable coordinates. BTW, the various “view location in…” menu items I added work with both real and shadow location data, so they’ll always work. —Jeffrey

writing back worked perfectly, thank you Jeffrey!

Thank you for this great tool. I have a question about the expiry. I will probably be using GPS-Support offline for up to three months this summer doing remote field work in the arctics. Will I run into problems with the plug-in expiring?
Best,

Sorry for the delay in responding, Lars…. when your question came in I knew I was planning on removing the expiration. Modern versions no longer expire, so upgrade and you’ll be fine. —Jeffrey

Hi Jeffrey. Found the problem – exiftool was throwing a minor error about the maker notes offset. Extract from log below.

C:\Users\Warren\Documents\Lightroom Plugins\gps-jfriedl.lrplugin\inject-gps: [minor] MakerNotes offsets may be incorrect (fix or ignore?) (Duplicate Orientation tag in IFD0)

The solution I’ve used is to add the following line in the inject-gps perl script after you create the image object (line 64):

$exifTool->Options(IgnoreMinorErrors => ‘1′);

It might be a good for you to include in the user interface a tick box that turns on or off the minor error checking.

Thanks again for the tool. It’s fantastic.

Warren

Now again with subcribtion.

The Problem is that the geoencoding itself works fine. I can see the shadow gps data. But after write back the data I cannot see it in LR or elsewhere. Also after rereading metadata from file no effect.

Frank

Hi again Jeffrey,

I have an another request about this plugin : Would it be possible to add a combobox list in the tab Geoencode Static Location, in order to record GPS coordinates of a list of places that are used frequently (eg home, work …). In this case I don’t always use my GPS unit and I need to search a photo previously geoencode.

I think it’s an interesting feature to simplify the workflow

Thank you for the answer even if it is negative

Absolutely. I’ll be adding that soon. —Jeffrey

GPS and “ÖÄÜ” is fixed! THANX!

Jeffrey,
Thanks for your incredibly useful plugins. I’ve started using the Geoencoding plugin and am wondering if it is possible to run other command line arguments in the GPSbabel configuration box? For example, can I run a discard command to cleanup up a GPS track from an NMEA logfile?

-x discard,hdop=10,vdop=10,hdopandvdop,sat=4

I tried adding it to the argument -i “nmea” but had no luck. Do I need to change the syntax or is the plugin simply not configured to accept additional functions?

Best,
Steve

You should be able to use whatever arguments you like… the plugin doesn’t care, except that it ensures you don’t set input/output filenames (it adds them) nor the ouput format (it sets it). You do have to be very careful about how you quote the arguments, and that’s dependent on the OS. Check out the plugin log (referenced in the upper-right corner of the Plugin Manager) for hints to the problem; feel free to send it to me (there’s a button in the Plugin Manager for that) if you need a hand. —Jeffrey

I’m just trying out your plugin. Great work!

One comment, when using the Write Shadow Data to Files feature, the window with the progress bar that popup does not change (i.e the progress bar does not indicate how many files are done).

Am I doing something wrong? This is on LR 2.3 and your latest version of GPS-Support plugin.

Ahmad

You’re not doing anything wrong. The actual writing back is done by an outside process, all in one batch, so the plugin doesn’t know anything about the progress until it’s all done. There’s an alternative that allows the progress bar to be updated properly, but it’s significantly slower, so I opted for speed rather than reporting. —Jeffrey

Mike,Jeffery

I run LR on my EeePC 901 which has a button that lets change from its default 1024×600 into 1024×768 with either the screen scrolling or the screen compressed. I find that if I use this mode before running LR then Jefferys GPS plugin works just great. I then switch back to native resolution when finished with the plugin.

And yes LR does work fairly well on the little EeePC, good enough for reviewing,tagging and writing comments, with some basic corrections. Just the job when travelling.

Mark

Mike

Lightrooms minum requirements does state 1,024×768 display so its possible we might come across other problems at 1024×600 but so far I have not found any, just the one using Jefferys GPS plugin so far.

I wonder if there any windows utilities out there that will allow a virtual 1024×768 on your MSI? Not great for editing images but might help you use Jefferys plugin.

Hi Jeffrey

Looks good on the Asus EeePc901 as well

Thanks

… maybe it’s me or Flickr, Jeffrey, but… seems there’s something wrong with GPS Date (and Time).

Yesterday I manually Geoencoded some files prior to uploading them on Flickr. Here are the resulting Dates/Times:

Date and Time (Original): 2009:01:31 18:32:22

Date and Time (Modified): 2009:03:22 04:09:25

GPSDate Time: 2009:03:03 17:32:22

So… I argue:

1) “Modified Date/Time” are those the picture has been uploaded to Flickr
2) “GPS Time” is *original’s* Greenwich Time (I’m in +1 Timezone)

but… where does that “GPS Date” come from? (the picture was manually Geoencoded on 20 or 21 March 2009)

Any help, please?

Wow, that’s really odd. Can you send (via email) info about the file at Flickr, and if the original is not available there, a copy of the original? —Jeffrey

Hi Jeffrey! I’m writing from California to say thanks for the plugins and also to report a bug. If the gpx file is in a directory with commas in the name, the plugin can’t find the gpx file. e.g. “/pictures/biking with Scott, Anne, and Bob/track.gpx”. The plugin gives an error saying, “Tracklog error: “/pictures/biking with Scott” does not exist. I haven’t tried other punctuation such as “&” and “:”, which are valid in Mac OS X directory names.

Fixed in .54. —Jeffrey

Jeffrey,

Thank you so much for the additional feature. It works perfectly.

Jeffrey: a very small glitch with “psd” files: “View locations in Google Earth” issues a “The selected photo is not geoncoded” alert (but it is) whilst it works just fine with both Google Maps and Yahoo! Maps

The Google Earth one actually considers all selected photos, not just the “most selected” one like the other options, so it seems that not all the selected photos are geoencoded. I should tidy that message up a bit, thanks. —Jeffrey

Hi

thanks for your great plugin, i use it alot. But recently i tried to write the gps data back to the files and most of the time it didn’t work.

There occured an error “?:3605: bad argument #2 to ‘?’ (value expected)”

See screenshort here Screenshot

What can I do to resolve this problem?

Thanks
Stefan

Try with the latest version, and if you get it again, send mail with the text of the error and the full version number of the plugin. —Jeffrey

Oh, and another thing.
I found the timezone setting confusing.
Both the gps and my camera are set to the same time and that means I have to set the timezone to Greenwich… which is odd, since I live in timezone UTC+1.

GPS satellites all work in UTC, so as far as I know, GPS receivers should be reporting tracklog times in UTC, or in something that can be converted to UTC. Maybe your tracklog is different… I’ll see when you send me one… —Jeffrey

Of course I know that exiftools is not a standard part of OS but when it is installed you should use it, avoiding discrepancies and benefitting of last updates.

It’s enough trouble getting the plugin to work on every different system out there…. it’s more work than I care to take on to try to figure out whether someone has an install of exiftool elsewhere on their system, where it is, whether it’s complete and compatible with the plugin’s needs.

About Google Earth I don’t understand how you can SEND location to it and not RETRIEVE location, is Google Earth API lacking functionality ?

No, but Lightroom’s is. Lightroom has an API call to launch a program (e.g. Google Earth). It has no way to connect to a program and exchange back-and-forth communications. As I said, it might be possible to work something out, somehow, (say, using files to communicate), but it would be difficult at best and I have plenty of low-hanging fruit to address first. This month is very busy for me with family things, but I hope to get more solid development time starting in May. —Jeffrey

As a former software developer I disagree with you, it makes no sense to embed software available in a library and checking of availability is easy to perform at installation. But I understand you develop during your spare time, so don’t worry.

As a former software developer, you should understand when you don’t understand the environment. —Jeffrey

Paolo, could you explain in detail what you suggest, I don’t really understand what you meant…

… so… why, in pictures geoencoded by HoudahGeo, GPS DateTime matches DateTime Capture Original whilst in those geoencoded using your great plugin is 2hours off (italy, here)?

is this a bug, or a misinterpratation, in HoudahGeo?

The Exif standard explicitly defines the GPS timestamp to be in UTC (see page 65 of the standard), so if HoudaGeo is putting something else there, it is in error. —Jeffrey

I noticed that you had to make a hack for the WGS84->”tokyo datum” geodetic transform. A quick look shows that if you search for the term “geodetic transform library” there are a handful of results that should make the process much much easier if needed in the future. On another note, the reverse geocoding is nice, any chance to see it implemented into a writeback so that it shows in the lightroom metadata?

There’s a library put out by some Japanese government agency, but it’s Windows only, and can’t be accessed from within Lightroom even on Windows, so it wasn’t much help for me. I precalculated a bunch of differentials ahead of time, and apply the one closest to the point in question, so I’m confident that the results from the method I came up with is pretty darn accurate. I’ve considered a reverse geoencoding plugin, but have yet to find a good source of data. Every place I’ve tried has had horrible results for Japan, and spotty results for whereever else I’ve checked. —Jeffrey

Hi,
great Plug-in. Another great Option for me, would be if it would be possible to pass the location names from the Plug-in Dialog directly to the Location description in Lightroom.

Thanks Mathes

That’s definitely on the short list. I’ll not have a lot of development time in April, but I hope to have a lot in May and June…. —Jeffrey

The plugin seems to be having issues with write-back on large TIF files — it choked on TIF files over 130MB. I get an error like this:

> Out of memory during “large” request for 134221824 bytes, total sbrk() is 275279872 bytes at C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2\lightroom_plugins\gps-jfriedl.lrplugin\lib/File/RandomAccess.pm line 201.

The worst part is it corrupts the file so when opening it in Photoshop I get “The document may be damanged (the file may be truncated or incomplete). Continue?”

After continuing, I find that the TIF file has indeed been corrupted — all the layers are lost as if the image is flattened (better than losing the layers altogether since these were finished images, but still sad to have lost them). Note: the corrupted file’s size is still the same, so the layer info is probably in there, but corrupt in some way such that photoshop sees it as a single layer.

FYI, this is on a vista box and is reproducible (I created a 200MB TIF file with 3 layers then tried to geoencode it with a static location using LR2.3).

Yikes, sorry about that(!) The plugin uses the exiftool library to do the writeback. Not sure what I can do here, but I’ll ask the exiftool author whether there’s a safer road I can take. —Jeffrey

I’m still not sure of the exact mechanics of how files are getting corrupted, but a quick and smart fix will be for me to have the plugin write each file to a temporary file, then rename over the original only if the first write succeeded. Besides being safer, I believe that it doesn’t try to build the whole thing in memory, so won’t fail on huge images. I’ll try to get this done tomorrow. —Jeffrey

Okay, just pushed version .58 that addresses this. It now never writes to an original file, but rather writes to a temporary file and then renames it over the original only if the temporary file could be written successfully in the first place. It also no longer tries to hold the entire image in memory at once, so it shouldn’t run out of memory anymore. I feel bad for your TIF that lost its layers, so just in case please backup images and test once before using in production. —Jeffrey

After updating to Version .59 I got the error “attempt to yield across metamethod/C-call boundary”. Using Lightroom 2.3 on Mac OS X. Can’t process any images Where can I download old versions?

Just pushed .60 that should fix that, thanks for the report. —Jeffrey

Great work! Looks very nice and it is pretty simple to use! I really appreciate your effort developing this great tool.

I’m running into a problem though, that is: “Write Data Back” does not actually write the existing metadata (in LR) back to files. It only saves the GPS shadow data into files. The proces starts and no error occurs. However the metadata is not written back to files, only the GPS shaddow data is written back. I can verify this by other tools (like properties windows of the picture to check the metadata and GeoSetter to verify the GPS data).

If I use internal command of LR to save metadata to the file, the meta data does get written well.

If I may assist with additional info, please let me know.

Yes, that’s how it works… the plugin write-back operation writes only the GPS info. If you’ve already “save metadata to file” (which in the case of non-DNG raw files creates an xmp file), the GPS data is added. Otherwise, the plugin itself creates an xmp file. If you don’t do the “save metadata to file” step first, then you can lose data when you “read metadata from file” after you write back the info. That’s why the plugin explicitly recommends doing the save first, as Step 1 of a four-step sequence. —Jeffrey

Hi Jeffrey,

thanks for your reply on my comment on May 1st.
I understand the problem. The data comes from a GPS-Logger, and I saved the data with its software to nma, csv and kml (these are the formats that are supported).
In the csv file, I found the date/time data and succeeded to convert it to gpx via gpsbabel (manually).
For some reason the plugin only succeeds to link 160 of 700 files, but I will try with geosetter whether it manages to link more.

In order to ‘debug’ this, a dialog with the Times of the Files (all) and the GPS Data that was found, like geosetter does would be very helpful. (let me know if you don’t know what I mean and I’ll provide a screenshot).

Thanks for your help!

Regards,
Hendrik

You may wish to increase the “Fuzziness” factor, to allow for photos taken between tracklog datapoints. I don’t quite understand the “Times of the Files” thing, so please do send a screenshot (via email). —Jeffrey

Jeffrey… seems that import location from Google Earth does not work anymore with GE’s Mac version released yesterday (5.0.11733.9347)

It seems to work for me, so perhaps you can send me an email with more details about what “does not work” means in this case. Thanks. —Jeffrey

Hello Jeffrey,

I’m using plugin version 20090510.69, and get the “no datapoints in the tracklog”; the tracklog in question is in GPX format, and has the time entries as far as I can see. You can check the tracklog in question at [...]

The times in that tracklog have no timezone, so the plugin didn’t know what to do with them. (GPX files are supposed to have times given in, and marked as, UTC; if not, it’s not a GPX file). However, I’ve run into enough devices that produce broken GPX files to go ahead and push a new version, .71, which assumes the photo timezone for datapoint times that have no timezones. —Jeffrey

I have a small problem when I use Geoencoding from Google Earth.
I have a Dutch version of Google Maps and also a Dutch version of Lightroom 2.3.
My OS is Vista Home Premium.

The problem occurs when I try to Import Location from Google Earth. After pressing the button a window with the message ?:8876 attempt to compare number with nil appears and there is not a valid location.

I found that the problem is the decimal point in English, in our language we are using a comma for the decimals and when I change the comma in a dot then there is a valid location and can I store the position.

I hope you can do something about this problem.

Thx
René

After you get the failure next time, please send a plugin log (via the “send to Jeffrey” button in the upper-right of the plugin manager) and I’ll take a look. Be sure you’re using the latest version of the plugin before you test it, though, because I thought I fixed that bug already. Thanks. —Jeffrey

Hi Jeffrey,

I really love the reverse geo-encoding feature and think it’s a great addition to the plugin.

Yesterday I selected over 200 photos with GPS coords. After fetching the city, country from the gps for the first photo and using the “tag photos in 1km radius” feature, many of the 200 photos were tagged but I had to scroll the whole list to find the ones that weren’t tagged and work them.

It would be nice to have a button that would remove the photos that were reverse geo-encoded while leaving the rest in the queue.

Thanks for the great work!
Ahmad

That’s a good idea… I’ll add a filter or something. Nice to hear some feedback…. I thought it would be a popular addition to the plugin, but yours is the first reaction of any kind I’ve received. Sort of depressing, actually, to spend that much time on something and then get the exact same reaction as if I hadn’t done it at all. So thanks for not only giving some indication that someone, somewhere has actually seen it, but a great feature idea, too. —Jeffrey

Yep, this is an excellent addition to the plugin! One minor quibble with the interface though, the distance data between rows in the white font is nearly invisible on my calibrated screen. I only really noticed it when the tool-tip popped up. Neat little feature though.

Hi Jeffrey
I love the plugins, and was really looking forward to the reverse geoencode from Google Earth. However, when trying this GetCurrentGEView.exe returns an error saying “Windows Scripting has not been initialized! Exiting application.” Is this something that needs to be initialized in Google Earth or Windows, and how? I’m running XP with all updates etc up to date.

Also the reverse geoencoding dialog has a button for bulk geoencoding but this is greyed out and there doesn’t seem to be a way to select multiple images – how does this work? As an addition to this, a select all button would be useful.

Thanks for all your hard work on this

I don’t know much about Windows stuff, so am not sure what to make of the “Windows Scripting has not been initialized” error. I’ll search around. The reverse geocodeing “bulk” button works with all the geoencoded images in the dialog (that is, it works to derive city/state/country for all images that have latitude/longitude), but it’s grayed out until at least one image in the dialog has latitude/longitude. The plugin works with the images that are selected when you invoke it. —Jeffrey

Hi Jeffrey,
What metadata identifiers should I be looking at if I want to include support for your GPS latitude and longitude in a plugin?

I have a routine that once loaded, allows you to transparently get the shadow data if it’s there, and the “real” GPS data otherwise. It’s on my Lua Code page. —Jeffrey

Additionally, further use of PostalCodeNumber would be really useful for me in the UK although I don’t see where this would fit in LR’s location metadata schema.
I see Google Maps API’s accuracy of 9 Premise (building name, property name, shopping center, etc.) level accuracy is available for some places – perhaps (linking to my above comment re location field (Louve, Tate Modern) this could be optionally displayed depending upon users preference for detail of metadata entered. Clearly this wouldn’t work with a 1km distance for similar files (in fact 1m would be needed and perhaps too many requests) but would be useful if offered.

Thanks again!

The problem with the postal code stuff is that at least for the countries I’ve tested, it’s very vague, as if they have a point and radius and that’s it. Doing a search in Japan will likely come back with 5 to 10 postal-code records (“Accuracy=5″) with different postal codes, at most one of which can be correct. It’s still just not ready for prime time. —Jeffrey

Hi Jeffrey,
Thanks for the handy plug-in. However, I’m still struggling with with getting the camera time, Garmin time, and plug-in time working together. Part of the problem might be that there’s not yet an entry for Newfoundland (where I am for the summer) Daylight Savings Time on the UTC Offset dropdown menu. Would you be able to add one in your next update? Alternatively, is there I way I can do so in the current version? Thanks, and thanks again for the valuable plug-in.
Scott

Wow, sorry, I thought I had them all covered. What’s your offset from UTC??? —Jeffrey

Thanks Jeffrey–worked a charm.

Re Altitude- I wasn’t looking for floor info, just being completest with data like ground altitude (Mt Fuji etc) so I can be a geek

I’m not sure theres a way using the LR Metadata editor plugin – might not be possible in LR – but after some fields one can click a side arrow and find all photos with the same metadata (cropped dimension I think does this) – is it possible to to this with other data like location?

Works fine on my Mac with Google Earth 5.0.11733.9347
A typing error : “When Goole Earth is running”
Is there a way to disable logging ? Each time I use Lightroom I have various items in my trash.
Thanks for last enhancements.

Thanks for the typo report… it’ll be fixed in the next release. Odd that it works for you… or that it doesn’t work for me and some others. Dunno why. Maybe I’ll change the prose to “may not work”. I’d like to understand why, though. The plugin doesn’t add anything to your trash. What do you see in there that you think is from the plugin? —Jeffrey

Usually the logs are in /Library/Logs or ~/Library/Logs and don’t bother.
I’ts not very important but every morning I have to check trash before emptying it.
I don’t understand what you mean by “have your system leave it in the temporary directory”, I don’t have any control on what system does.

I don’t know your system (my Mac doesn’t do what you’ve described), but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were an option in /etc/rc to control this. —Jeffrey

Thanks for .84/Country code fix, appreciate the work you put in to this.

Hi Jeffrey,

i’m back from a trip to Zanzibar. Now i have the following problem: we had two cameras. One of them had an GPS attached for geotagging (which worked most of the time). But the photos from the second camera are not geotagged. My idea would be a feature like tagging from a tracklog but from photos in a specific time range… Would that be possible?

You might try using something to make a KML file representing all the geoencoded photos (the “View in Google Earth” feature of my plugin will do this), then see whether you can convert that to a GPX file somehow (say, with GPS Babel), then use that to geoencode the remaining photos…. —Jeffrey

Hi, just downloaded your GeoEncoder, just wondering what I did wrong, I used all the default settings when doing the shadow data, however most of my images did not gets a gps location. I am just wondering before I saw your plugin I was using another geotagging program called RoboGeo and it assigned a gps location on all my pics. Maybe I did something wrong can you help?

Did you check the fuzziness factor? Depending on how you made the tracklog, it might not have datapoints very often in time. Send details by email if need be… —Jeffrey

Hi, I am still doing test on your wonderful program, this is the first time that I will export to flickr and I encountered the following error. When I looked at log file here is a small cut of the log file. I checked the directoy and I did not find the perl.exe program. Can you help?

Error writing metadata to see the log file

RUNNING: “”C:\Users\hongning\Documents\LightRoom Plugin\gps-20090707.85\gps-jfriedl.lrplugin\Win\perl.exe” -CioIO -I “C:\Users\hongning\Documents\LightRoom Plugin\gps-20090707.85\gps-jfriedl.lrplugin\Win” -I “C:\Users\hongning\Documents\LightRoom Plugin\gps-20090707.85\gps-jfriedl.lrplugin\lib” “C:\Users\hongning\Documents\LightRoom Plugin\gps-20090707.85\gps-jfriedl.lrplugin\inject-gps” “C:\Users\hongning\AppData\Local\Temp\LR-52″ 1> “C:\Users\hongning\AppData\Local\Temp\LR-53″ 2>&1″
Status: 1
Execute log:
————————————————–
> ‘”C:\Users\hongning\Documents\LightRoom Plugin\gps-20090707.85\gps-jfriedl.lrplugin\Win\perl.exe”‘ is not recognized as an internal or external command,
> operable program or batch file.
————————————————–

Perhaps your version got corrupted… perl.exe should be in the Win subfolder. You should upgrade to the latest version before reporting bugs anyway , so maybe give the latest a try. It’s possible that the upgrade process didn’t work properly, and silently failed, and if so (if you don’t see perl.exe in the Win subfolder), please do a manual install. I should have the upgrade process do a checksum of the files to make sure they got installed properly…. I’ll think about that. —Jeffrey

Hi Jeffrey

Can you add support for IGN map ? This is the french service mapping (Institut Géographique National) and the maps are excellent on french territories (often better than Google map). Try here http://www.geoportail.fr/changeLangue.do?lang=en&cty=UK

All documentation on the API Geoportail is available in English
https://api.ign.fr/geoportail/api/doc/index.html

Happy holidays,
Florent

PS : thanks again for all your work on your plugins

I’ll add it to the todo list…. —Jeffrey

I’ve just discovered that JPGs that are a result of Lr export after geotagged with your plugin, do show GPS data as viewed with Geosetter (GS), but will not show GPS data with Lr (see previous posts). However, a similar JPG, previously not geotagged, but then geotagged after Lr export with Geoencoder (GE), will not show GPS data with GS, but will show GPS data with Lr. The problem seems to be with Lr’s Geocoding support metadata presentation after export. The other problem seems to be a difference in the way GE embeds initially, and it being imcompatible with GS (I can provide example JPG example of the latter problem).

This is all explained on the pages that describe the plugin… see viewing geodata. —Jeffrey

Hi,
there Thanks again for your great Plugin, and also for the picasa one. but I ran into a Problem today. It seems that there is a Problem with reverse-geoencoding. I get this Error:

+2934.9: [457F7F8] line 12070: [string "return {..."]:11: ‘}’ expected (to close ‘{‘ at line 10) near ‘:’

Everything works fine, but the reverse-geoencoding. Same in the interactive encoding tab.

Thanks Mathes

Just pushed a fix, v88. Sorry for the hassles. —Jeffrey

THANK YOU for fixing the problem with reverse geocoding so quickly.

I had a backlog of pictures I wanted to reverse geocode. I selected them in Lightroom and passed them to you. I used the “Bulk Reverse Geocode” feature for 581 pictures.

At picture #215 the plugin presented a dialog box that said:

Confirm
Fetching reverse geocoding data for image #215 of 581
and two buttons “abort” and “continue”.

I replied “continue” and it finished the batch without further alerts.

My guess is that there was a glitch in the communications with Google Earth (the plugin must be throwing many requests at it) but the dialog didn’t say that.

Thought you’d like to know. It’s certainly not an urgent issue. Enjoy your vacation.

Thanks again, Ian

If you get it again, please send a plugin log (with the “Send to Jeffrey” button in the upper-right of the Plugin Manager)…. that’ll have the full response from Google, which hopefully I can code to look out for in the future… —Jeffrey

For the last few version updates I’ve been unable to manage the update through the Plug-in Manager. The dialog box that says, “Downloading new plugin from Jeffrey’s server…” comes up, but nothing seems to happen (I’ve waited for more than a minute); even the cancel button doesn’t work. I’ve only been able to recover by doing a forced quit for Lightroom.

I’ve been downloading the .sit file and manually moving the file, but something’s changed for me as the manager connection used to work. Any thoughts about how to move beyond this?

I did change a while ago how the new version is downloaded, but if the cancel button doesn’t work, I’m guessing that the network request is getting stuck at the OS level. The network requests I use for the download are different from anything else the plugin does, and so maybe you’re getting bit by something with your ISP or firewall. I’ve not heard of any other problems, so can’t really speculate. Next time you get stuck, take a look at the plugin log file (referenced in the upper-right of the Plugin Manager)…. if LR is stuck, you’ll have to look manually at the file, but perhaps there will be some clues…. —Jeffrey

Hi Jeffrey,
Playing around with your plugins. Currently geoencoding by hand upwards of 10000 pictures…i have to buy a GPS …

I’ve run into what may be a bug …
When reverse geoencoding pictures from Bahrain, Google returns raw data that seems accurate, which includes a “locality name” that is “Manāma”, notice the unicode ā character.
The plugin unfortunately doesn’t populate the “city” field (although the “apply” button is checked). The GPS location is

When i do the same for pictures in Paris, the city field is populated…

It would seem to be an issue with non standard characters …
On a side note, in windows, i can’t copy the green data field that is parsed from the google data, so i actually have to use the “character table ” to manually input the ā character …

Thanks for your help

The data returned by Google is a big hairy mess. If you send me a plugin log (via the “Send to Jeffrey” button in the upper-right of the plugin manager) after trying to reverse-geoencode the Bahrain location, I’ll see what I can figure out. It’s on the todo list for me to expose all the various names as selectable text, so you can cut-n-paste more easily. —Jeffrey

I’m trying this plugin and it works very nice. For me it would be useful the possibility to add an altitude offset when geotagging from a gpx tracklog. Are you planning to implement it?

Thanks and regards,

Pietro

It does use the altitude, if the gpx file has it. Not all do. —Jeffrey

Just a note: Google Earth 5 is working fine with GPS-Support plugin on Mac OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard”. It wasn’t, for someone (including me) on 10.5.x “Leopard”

Oh, great to hear! I just got Snow Leopard, too…. I’ll give GE5 a try! —Jeffrey

Hi,
I’m trying your plugin from yesterday and it works a charm!
Just a (hopefully simple) addition would be very helpful:
I’ve just returned from a trip in Scotland and I had the GPS (a Gisteq PhotoTracker) on all the time. It automatically stopped recording when speed was less than a certain amount and whenever I stopped for more than 5 minutes.
This way, I have lots of images taken without a corresponding GPS position (unless I put a fuzziness of 3000+ seconds) but the two nearest recorded points are just 5 meters apart!!!!
It would be nice to geotag these as well, given a distance threshold, so that if a photo has no GPS position within the fuzziness and the closest points (by time) are closer than the threshold, the position is kind of between them.
Could it be done?
Ciao,
Giulio from Italy

The situation you describe also applies to when you (for example) walk down into a subway and take a trip somewhere, take some photos, then return, getting a signal again as you emerge from the same subway station. The locations on either end of the hours-long dead spot are identical, but photos were taken kilometers away. So, it’s not something the plugin should do automatically. If you know that’s not the case, then do just set the fuzziness to 3000 seconds, at least temporarily. —Jeffrey

Hi Jeffrey,

I use your geoencoding plugin for lightroom for a while now and really love it.
I noticed something (a bug maybe) that when I get the data from google earth and it has a negative altitude (I’m from Holland we are below sea level) that after writing it back to the file and reading the metadata into lightroom, the negative sign has disappeared.
(for instance location 52.242575, 4.8168617 near my home has -2.8m altitude but after coding it into the file it shows as 2.8m in lightroom.)

Maybe something to look after.

Best regards,
Michel.

Hi,

I’m using your Geoencoding plugin for a few days now, and after a bit of learning to understand all the GUI, I finally find the best way to put it in my workflow, and I really love it.
But recently, adobe labs pushed LR3b out. Wanting to give it a try, I downloaded it and started playing with it. I’m especially interested in their new Import/Export modules, and how their Flickr module compete with yours .
As I wanted to keep geotagging my pictures, I added Geoencoding (updated) to LR3b.
Here are a little bugs I’ve noticed.
First when it doesn’t manage to convert GPS info to IPTC metadata.
The GPS coordinates to adress still works great, but it is not parsed anymore to fill the following fields: Location, City, State, Country, ISO Code.
Second issue I’ve came across, is in Interactive mode. Previews are not displayed, even if I run a Render Standard Preview on the whole library.
Finally, more like a feature request, even if I’m not sure the Lightroom SDK allows it. A keyboard shorcut would be awesome to quickly get the Geoencode form.

Regards,
Thibaud from France

Most of what you mention has been covered, though perhaps only in English. Lightroom does not let plugins set gps data, so the best I could do is come up with the “Shadow GPS data”, which is the same information but in private plugin metadata. Look for more on the announcement page. The preview stuff doesn’t work in LR3b at all…. it’s only lucky that I could get it in LR2, but I’ll try more in LR3 and perhaps get lucky again. With some work you can set up a keyboard shortcut. —Jeffrey

Thank you very much.
One more bug or request as I don’t remember how it was working in LR2.

In the Geoencode static Location Pane, I can quickly set coordinates for multiple files, and the location adress is retrieven automaticly, but IPTC fields are not set. I must then go to the Interactive Pane, and press the bulk reverse button. Is it possible to have the IPTC fields set as soon as the location adress is reversed from the coordinates I type? That would be awesome and really time savy.

Regards,

I have started to see a consistent set of errors in version 20091102.97 of your most excellent plug-in.

When I start it up to geocode some pictures I get a dialog box that says: “An internal error has occurred: access to undefined global: a”. If I click OK the plugin proceeds and I can geocode pictures in Interactive mode.

However, related errors pop up for every picture when I try to reverse geocode. They relate to this undefined global “a” and reverse geocoding no longer works.

I can send you screen shots or logs if you need more information.

Thank you very much for all your efforts on this and all your other Plugins. They are actually the main reason I use Lightroom in preference to other workflow tools.

Sorry about that… just pushed .98 which fixes it. I can’t figure out how that one got past me. —Jeffrey

Version 99 fixed the problem. That’s great – thank you.

I looked at your log file and am amazed that for the test photo I used Google gives 8 choices for the location given a lat/long pair. Some are in Thai and English, others are all English. This is possibly a complex case because I was near a major intersection.

I wonder why the plugin chooses p5 for the location?

I have the plugin go through a bunch of heuristics about which to choose – it’s fairly complex due to the mixed-up nature of the data and the stuff the data describes (various cultural and political human conventions on location description) – but in many cases what it amounts to is taking the first one whose “accuracy” element is 4 or lower. In spot testing all over the world, I’ve often found this to give the best for the concept of “city” and above. —Jeffrey

I discuss the difficulties of reverse geocoding Bangkok addresses a bit at http://bkkphotographer.wordpress.com/2009/11/06/reverse-geoencoding/.

I think a general solution exists that will make everyone happy because the data you are working with isn’t consistent. I’m happy if I get a consistent result over time. That means I can search Lightroom for, say, photos taken in kawaeng “Khlong Tan Nuea” and know I have them all.

Thanks again, Ian

Hello, Sweden calling .
I was plying around with your plugin in LR 3, ok i know it’s a beta but when i try to import the location from Google earth with the geo plugin, and when i checked if it worked, it has missplaced the spot.
works in LR 2.4.
//Stefan

Hello Jeffrey,

New registered user from Western Iowa here and I very much like how this plug-in works. Mostly I’ll be using static locations and I have quite a few of them entered so far. Is there a way I can back those static coordinates up so when I get a new computer next year I can transfer them over to it? Thanks for a great plug-in!

John

You can save and restore via the save/load buttons in the middle-right of the “Static” pane. —Jeffrey

I have a Columbus V-900 and am trying to use your plugin with gpsbabel but there doesn’t seem to be a set format for the files that the V-900 creates. I can create a custom .style file for gpsbabel but how do I reference the location of the file in the plugin? Something along the lines of csv -i “location of v900.style”.

I don’t have any experience with these style things, but from a glance at the GPSBabel manual it looks as if you need -i style=v900.style. —Jeffrey

Jeffrey, I geoencoded a photo from a “static position”. When I try to write data back according to recommended sequence, “Save” and “Read” options in LR2 are greyed. Why is that?.
I don´t see real gps data in exif info on the right pane. I usually do. What I’m missing or doing wrong now?

I hate to bring up the obvious, but are you sure that you actually have images selected? —Jeffrey

Thanks Jeffrey.
I “workaround” geoencoding the orginal file, making new virtual copies from the geoencoded picture, and syncing settings from the “old” virtual copies to the new ones. Finally, deleted the old virtual copies.
Is there a different way to do it?

I don’t know… I haven’t had a chance to look at it yet, sorry. —Jeffrey

Hello Jeffry,

I do a lot of aerial photography. I normally use a GPS device that writes to the NIKON NEF file. Sometimes however the GPS does not come live fast enough and I do not have GPS info written to the RAW file. I now want to make it “Real” GPS info. I have downloaded the plugin and am trying to export with SHADOW GPS info injected. I never find the GPS info in the files (Photoshop > File info), nor when I reimport the RAW image. Are there instructions somewhere to do this?

Thanks a bunch!

Florian from Germany

“Inject” is what happens during export, but if you want the data to become “real” GPS inside Lightroom, you’ll need to “Write Back”. There’s a write-back tab in the geoencoding dialog with more information. —Jeffrey

Thanks for adding support for Bing Maps. However, I see that you can view Location as the Bing map but configure map only shows various Google or Yahoo maps. Can this dialog be extended to also include Bing maps as an option?

Ina

Sorry, forgot about that. Added in v105. —Jeffrey

Just one little thing: the dates of the xmp sidecar files don’t change when updated with the gps data, so my backup software skips then completely. Is there a way of forcing the date to be updated?

I could update the plugin to update the dates, but you would be better served to get better backup software(!) —Jeffrey

Hi Jeffrey,
I like your plugin and it works great with my raws.
But when I export them into jpegs I cannot longer see the GPS shadow in lightroom.
The gps-log is – as I understad it – o.k. and I can see the GPD data in bridge but not in lightroom, what can I do?

Thanks for help from germany
Beate

Make sure to add (and enable) the “GPS Shadow Injector” in the Export Dialog… it’s exactly what you’re missing. —Jeffrey

Great plugin!
Would it be possible to let the user edit (in a config file?) what version of Google Maps and Earth he is using? In the current version I miss e.g. the swedish versions.
Thank you
Bertil

You can already configure Google Maps via the “configure map url” link in the Geoencoding dialog, though there was apparently no Swedish version of G! Maps when I did that. I’ll look into adding it. As for Google Earth, just pushed a new version that allows you to configure that in the plugin manager. —Jeffrey

Hi Jeff,
Thanks for this awesome plug-in. I was wondering if you were planning to add support for loading multiple gpx tracklogs into future versions. I think this would streamline the process. Instead of having to repeat the geocoding process for every day’s shoot, a person could simply select all their photos from multiple days, load all their tracklogs into the plug-in simultaneously, and process them in one step.

Brad

The tracklog-input box can accept multiple files, and you can select multiple files in the browse dialog. That’s why the label is “tracklog(s)” —Jeffrey

Further to my comments above regarding the GiSTEQ PhotoTrackr .GPS format, it seems that GPSBable does indeed support it but indirectly. One selects NMEA and then ticks the GiSTEQ option. Now what I need to know to what do I change the GPSBable argument -i”gpx” in you plugin to reflect this?

I’d think that -i "nmea,gisteq" would do it. If it doesn’t, please email a test tracklog. —Jeffrey

Great Plugin! Works perfectly together with my amod 3080. Great way to geotag raws (DNG’s in my case)

Tested it for a while a decided to donate…. just a normal amount and not the 0,01 eurocent.
Like everyone just compesate this guys’ work!! Great stuff… keep supporting it! THANKS!