March 23, 2007
GPS metadata in Lightroom and Google Maps
Here is a hidden feature that has been around in Lightroom since Beta 2, but is one that I only found out about it recently thanks to a recent story on John Nack’s Adobe blog. Basically, if you have GPS metadata embedded in an image file, Lightroom will let you link directly to Google Maps and locate exactly where that photograph had been taken.
But in order to pull off this trick you will need to find a way to embed GPS metadata in your image capture files. This is not as difficult as you might imagine, since there are now several GPS devices capable of capturing the GPS coordinates at the time of capture and then synchronize the GPS data with your capture images via post-processing software. For example, according to John Nack’s blog, Jobo AG has announced photoGPS, a $149 device that sits in the hot shoe (i.e. the mounting point for a flash) of a digital SLR. Post-processing software synchronizes data captured by the device with the corresponding images.
In the following steps, I have used a set of images with embedded GPS metadata, kindly provided by Ian Lyons to demonstrate how Lightroom can use such metadata to link to Google Maps. By the way, you can see more of Ian’s photographs taken around the Falklands and Antarctica on his Computer Darkroom website.
1. Here is a Library view of Ian’s photographs showing a selection of images shot around the Falklands and South Georgia islands.
2. In this Loupe view mode I have focussed on one of the photographs and you can see that if I roll the mouse over the arrow alongside the GPS metadata item, a tooltip dialog displays ‘Map Location’.
3. Here is a close-up view of the Metadata panel showing the GPS metadata information
4. Click on the arrow next to the GPS metadata and (providing you have a live Internet connection) this will take you directly to Google Maps, pin-pointing exactly where the photograph was taken.
5. If Google Maps will allow you to, you will often be able to zoom in further, to get a closer look at the location where the photograph was taken.
6. If you happen to have the Google Earth program installed on your computer you can also copy and paste the GPS coordinates and use the more extensive navigation tools to explore the scene where the photograph was taken. In this example I tilted the view to a ground level view of the site where Ian took his photograph.
This is so awesome! This is exactly the type of thing I wanted to see in Lightroom. I’ve been going bananas over the IPTC location stuff. I’m eagerly awaiting a plug-in for Lightroom that someone should build that implements Google Earth right in Lightroom and stacks your photos on the globe.
Question — if I want to add the GPS EXIF tags to my photos, how can I do that in Lightroom?
There are several ways to geotag photos later even w/o the need for a GPS device. Do a search for Geotagger (Mac-only) - it will take the coordinates that you point Google Earth to and embed it into the metadata of a wide variety of pictures via drag-n-drop. It works quite well. I just wish, Lightroom itself could do so - that would again be one step less to perform.
Whilst the concept of drag and drop is useful (also inexpensive) Geotagger apparently only works with JPEG images. So, for those who shoot Raw and/or convert to DNG I would suggest that you take a look at an application called GPSPhotoLinker, which can be found at http://oregonstate.edu/~earlyj/gpsphotolinker/ Like Geotagger it’s written for Mac OSX.
Maybe I should have had another look at Geotagger before posting above because it does support drag and drop for raw files (just checked Canon CRW, CR2 and DNG). It looks like it could be fairly simple way of applying quick and dirty longitude and latitude info to existing images.
I should be clearer. I actually don’t really care about the drag & drop feature. I can get the GPS coordinates easily enough. I just want to figure out how to shove them into the EXIF data. The field doesn’t seem to appear in Lightroom unless it’s magically already been populated.
And I only shoot raw, so JPEG stuff is a no go.
In essence, I’m willing to do the work of putting it in there for a few hundred of the photos I have.
The GPS data is an extension of EXIF that can’t be written to the file in Lightroom. However, there are numerous applications (most free or very low cost) designed for this purpose, which allow you to take the GPS data that you already have and write it into the relevant images. Even if you don’t use Mac it’s worth reading the on-line documentation as it will give you an idea how to about geotagging your images. Better still, do a Google search for and you will find lots of info on this topic.
“The GPS data is an extension of EXIF that can’t be written to the file in Lightroom.”
And as you point out, numerous applications provide for editing of the GPS EXIF fields, so why not Lightroom? It would certainly be more convenient for your customers. Please help us an provide this.
GPSPhotoLinker is really quite nice since it can do time averaged interpolations when a photo’s time stamp falls between two track points.
It would be great to have a Geotagging module that, among other things, could manage log files (GPX, KML…); determine speed and heading; transfer the data to image files; interface with Google Earth/Map; do custom transfers of postion data to IPTC location fields; create Google Earth Layers of network feeds and KMZ files; image searching by locations radius —- i could go on and on.
A nice start would be modifing the current web templates to make the GPS element a link to google maps just as it is in the Library Module.
I agree with Zemke. Expanding Lightroom to add standard EXIF tags and edit them would be very useful.
I’m currently in the situation of knowing the GPS coordinates for a set of photos and would love to simply be able to type them into Lightroom.
It is posible to write the gps data in an XMP file before importing the photos in lightroom
sample:
52 46.423N
6 39.456E
the first sample is converted bij the webserver
sample:
“”
“”
“”
“52 46.423N”
“6 39.456E”
“”
“”
“”
You can use a program like the one show here to write GPS metadata to the file before importing to Lightroom or after. But you can’t write GPS metadata directly to a file via Lightroom: the GPS field will not show if there is no GPS metadata present.
Martin
I have images geocoded in Lightroom. When I did this before I could export them and make sure to NOT check the “Minimize Embeded Metadata” and it would include the lat long in the JPG. On the Mac you could open it up in Preview and see the location. Today it does not seem to work anymore. I can export and keywords show up but location data is missing. Any idea why? I am running version 1.4.1
UPDATE: when I geocode the images with GPSPhotoLinker it works fine with CR2 files with my older 1Ds it writes .TIF Raw files and it clobers them. I reimported them and just geocoded the JPG version but now it doesn’t combine the location data from the JOG images on export. It does show it in Lightroom on that image but not on export.