iPhone 3G & Geotags & XML Google Maps plugin

A feature I wasn’t aware of is that the iPhone 3G can geotag photos, thanks to the built-in GPS chip.

The XML Google Maps plugin reads the GPS position information from the Exif tags of the image stored in the NextGEN Gallery. Use “xmlgm ngg_gallery=<gallerid>” to show the whole geotagged Gallery on your map or use “xmlgm ngg_picture=<picture id>” to show a single picture !

Here the photo made with the iPhone:
[SinglePic not found]

Finally the Exif data using the showmeta.php of nextgen gallery: EXIF

On my wishlist are:

  1. iPhone doesn’t properly tag photos with geodata. There are some posts out there referring to this problem. Guess this is something to be fixed by Apple. I had to manually fix geodata using GeoSetter
  2. A feature request for the NextGen Gallery: extend showmeta.php to also read and display geodata from photos
  3. Another one for NextGen Gallery: provide function / parameter, which allows adding Exif data to an image / gallery in a post, something like: [SinglePic not found]
  4. XML Google Maps and route tracking: can I combine tracking and photo location in one map ?

Comments welcome !

For (1) this seems to be a known issue, yet not fixed – so far it requires some manual intervention.

The problem of the iPhone’s Camera app assigning only North and West values to the EXIF lat/lon REF tags has been noted in this forum at apple. This problem is different from the iPhoto bug, which would occasionally strip the lat/lon REF tags from photo EXIF.

Instead, the problem that smokeonit is talking about is an actually iPhone camera app bug, which seems only willing to put North and West tags on. People in Japan get their photos plopped in the pacific ocean, on the other side of the international date line (because they have a W lon tag when they should have an E lon tag). People in Australia have their pics on the opposite side of the planet.

This has been observed to happen even when iPhoto is not even used. So it’s an iPhone software bug. See the apple discussion board for more info.  Yeesh. Apple is not good at geotagging. First they screwed it up in iPhoto, then they screwed it up in iPhone.

Remove the minus for the longitude and you are done.

[SinglePic not found]

A good link about geotagging images and some applications, which might be helpful:

runkeeper
AirMe
iTrail
Geosetter
PhotoMe

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Posted at : August 8th, 2008 - 8:56 pm
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Comments (2 comments)

hi bernhard!

i try to accomplish exactly what you did here – unforunately, i do not have any success…

a link to a gpx file is well interpreted by the xml google maps plugin, but a getagged photo does not bring up the map like in your case…i started looking at the thumbnails, as nextgen is removing all exif tags while resizing the images – your thumb does not contain any exif information as well…???

i even tried to use your kuessnacht image – it does not work on my installation…

what did you do to get this running?

thanks for your feedback and nice greetings from vienna!

transferrin / March 16th, 2009, 10:55 / #

hi, seems you managed to overcome the gps/gpx obstacles … right ? At least from looking at your site things kook good.
Have a niec weekend.
bernhard

bernhard / March 20th, 2009, 19:00 / #

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