What tool do you use to fill IPTC place tags from EXIF GPS coordinates?

[Olli-Pekka Isola]

Hi experts,

What tools do you use for reverse geotagging? That is, filling IPTC Location, City, State and Country automatically from GPS coordinates written into EXIF metadata.

[Uwe]

Hello,

I would prefer Geosetter: https://geosetter.de/en/main-en/

Regards, Uwe

[WilfriedB]

1 hour ago, Olli-Pekka Isola said:

What tools do you use for reverse geotagging?

As Uwe said, GeoSetter is the best tool for that, also in my opinion. However, I am a little insecure about its future. For several years, the author published only some beta versions. In 2018(?) he came up with a new official version and promised to continue improving the tool, but since then, I haven't heard anything new.

Nevertheless, I still love to use it and don't know what to do, in case a new Windows version would prevent it from working.

For bug reporting and to get insights behind the scene or suggestions of other users watch  https://www.geosetter.de/mantis/my_view_page.php  , but as I said above, the author is silent again since a long time 😞

In any case, give it a try and if you have any questions, posts them here.

[lintujuh]

I don't know if it depends on your UI language, but I get the place names in English (as I'm running Windows in English), so my images would be in Finland, not in Suomi.

Also, I have only found how you can do it to a single image, but I haven't found a way to assign the place names to a group of images. Maybe @WilfriedB or @Uwe can help here.

[WilfriedB]

16 hours ago, lintujuh said:

but I get the place names in English

Hi Juha, hope, you are doing well ...?

GeoSetter does not maintain its own place names. It gets it from geonames.org or any other Webservices you can select in settings. I assume, this is where the language may be defined (or not). You don't have to, but you can set your own user profile for geonames in the settings. I did so, but I forgot, for what reason. In any case, you can also overwrite one or more of the suggestions for a place manually (e.g. Finland -> Suomi). GeoSetter remembers those values, so the next time you only need to type the first character(s) and select from the pull-down.

16 hours ago, lintujuh said:

assign the place names to a group of images

There are several possibilities, a strength of GeoSetter. I describe one here and more in a later response:

Select multiple images and press Ctrl+E (edit data). I might a long time to open the following window (seems to be a bug since Windows 10):

In the lower left pane, make sure to select the image (red marker) which already has the correct place (and/or other tags), then press "Set Current Values ..." (blue marker) and you'll see the following dialog:

Here, you can select which values from the selected image you want to copy to the others in the Edit-list

Let me know, if you have questions.
regards
Wilfried

[WilfriedB]

15 hours ago, lintujuh said:

I haven't found a way to assign the place names to a group of images

Juha, as I said in my response above, there are multiple ways to set the same values of the place tag to multiple images:

• Favorites. If you define a favorite for a place you often visit, you can not only define the numerical coordinates, but also Country, State, City, Location, but also a radius around it. All images inside that radius will be set to those values, even if their coordinates were read from a GPX-track. Furthermore, for images without track information you can assign the favorite (i.e. coordinates plus place tags). Since this is always the center of the radius, I usually fine tune, by dragging the marker on the map.
• Assigning on the map. If you select one or more images in the thumbnail or list view, the one you selected last(!) shows on the map a purple marker with a yellow dot, the others show blue markers. If you drag and drop the purple/yellow marker to a different position, that new position will be assigned to all selected images. There might appear a dialog, to select the place tags from a list (or type them manually) and then to ask for permission to replace the current tags, if there are any.
  
   
• Copy Data to Clipboard Similar to Copy tags ... (Alt+Shift+C) in Daminion, there is a copy Data to Clipboard (Ctrl+Shift+C) in GeoSetter to copy a set of selected tags - not only the place. (Note the different shortcuts for Daminion and GeoSetter - can drive you crazy sometimes 😞  )
• If you did assign exactly the same coordinates to an image, the next will have the place tag automatically (if I remember correctly)
• After selecting an images with complete coordinates and tags, you can Set the position marker from focused image by clicking the button with red marker and arrow to the right:
  
  After that, select one or more other images and click the the button with red marker and arrow to the left (circled green in my screen shot)

Not sure, this is complete, but I hope, it helps

regards
Wilfried

[lintujuh]

Hi Wilfried, I'm doing well. I haven't been active hear lately. I need to be better 🙂

I didn't know the possibility of selecting multiple images. Favorites I have used, that's nice for places where go photographing often.

I was more thinking of use case where you have been on a short trip, and you have 100 images taken in different places. You first match you gpx file with your images and get GPS coordinates in place. What then? Can I select all the 100 images, that were taken in 5 different cities and 20 different suburbs/villages and get them reverse geotagged in one go? Or do I have to do it in pieces per each sublocation?

[WilfriedB]

1 minute ago, lintujuh said:

Can I select all the 100 images, that were taken in 5 different cities ....

Juha, yes, you can! The short cut is Ctrl+G. The best is, if your GPX file is in the same folder where the images are. If there multiple GPX file in the same folder, you might get an error message that it did not find a matching time stamp, because it picked the wrong one. In these case, you can open the Tracks dialog (Ctrl+T) and select manually which GPX file should be used.

[WilfriedB]

9 minutes ago, lintujuh said:

in 5 different cities and 20 different suburbs/villages and get them reverse geotagged in one go

For each group of images in a closer area, you'll see a separate dialog to select/enter the place tags. Not sure though, how far the distance needs to be to consider the images in different areas.

[WilfriedB]

30 minutes ago, lintujuh said:

in different places

I forgot one thing, Juha: For the first found location, you get a dialog where you can select or enter the place tags and then either click Select or Select for All. The latter does not mean all selected images, but all of the selected within a certain distance.

The example below reminds me do another point: For the Sublocation, I normally use my own definitions, either copy & paste (from Daminion) or, if used before by typing first characters and picking from the pull-down. Also sometimes for city and rarely for state. For France, I always use my own standard for the "state": Region XX Departement (XX = Dept number).

[lintujuh]

Thank you for all your tips and tricks. I need to try them. I have normally tagged the places in Daminion.

[WilfriedB]

You are very welcome, Juha 😞

9 minutes ago, lintujuh said:

I have normally tagged the places in Daminion

As I said, for many parts of the tags, I also use my own names. In those case, I switch between Daminion and GeoSetter, to copy and paste the values from Daminion.

One word of caution:

It is best to use GeoSetter, before importing into Daminion. If you have special characters, such as â, ä,ö,ü, it can happen after saving in GeoSetter and Action -> Read Tags from File in Daminion, that it destroys the special characters. For example, â appears as â in Daminion. This never happened after the first change with GeoSetter, but quite often after touching the image a second time, after importing into Daminion

[lintujuh]

One reason for using GeoSetter only for coordinates has been that I have wanted to put the GPS coordinates in my RAWs, but the leave the place names in .xmps. Tagging the places in Daminion is fast and, as you said, you can use also your own names where needed.

-Juha