Mac/iPhone filter: picture to GPS coordinates, as few steps as possible

May 20, 2013 8:41 AM

I'm a travel blogger - the sort that tries to give *good* directions to places I've traveled. Here in Thailand, there's no easy way of figuring out the address system (the locals barely seem to use them - and the Thai script is admittedly still a mystery)... The solution has been to snap a picture with my iPhone's built-in camera app, with the GPS turned on. The idea is to provide the GPS coordinates and a URL to those coordinates on Google Maps. This captures the place, but then involves loading it onto the computer, matching up features on Picasa's map to Google Maps, then right-clicking the 'What's Here?' to get the coordinates. What I'd love is a website or an app on the iPhone or for the Mac that can look at a picture and display the GPS coordinates - bonus points if it shows the point on Google Maps... Is there anything like that out there? :)
posted by chrisinseoul to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

It's hugely overkill for just pulling out GPS data, but in case it's already part of your workflow, Aperture (Apple's pro photo library manager) lets you see the raw GPS data that's embedded in your photos. Open the "Info" panel, choose the "GPS" info set, and you can copy and paste out the latitude and longitude.
posted by duien at 9:30 AM on May 20, 2013 [2 favorites]

Best answer: After a little more searching, there's also File Viewer, a free app on the Mac App Store that shows you all the metadata embedded in a photo, including latitude and longitude.
posted by duien at 9:35 AM on May 20, 2013 [1 favorite]

If you do Command-I on the picture in Finder, there's a GPS tab with a clickable link.
GpsPrune is a free tool that can create a Google Earth KMZ file with embedded photo links.
posted by scruss at 9:57 AM on May 20, 2013

Does posting to whatever Google calls its web photo service now not do this automatically? If not there is probably a setting to make geo info public.
posted by Good Brain at 10:28 AM on May 20, 2013

Best answer: iPhoto (for Mac and iOS) will display the locations of your photos on a map.
posted by designbot at 1:04 PM on May 20, 2013

Response by poster: duien for the win! The File Viewer will be living on my desktop - for anyone else reading this, it'll show the GPS in decimal format, and is copy-and-pastable. iPhoto works great if you want to make a map, and Picasa is good at placing dots on a map as well. I never did find the GPS tab in Finder, though, and while Aperture is a great program it's not (yet) part of the workflow.

Thanks all :)
posted by chrisinseoul at 10:29 PM on May 20, 2013