EXIF GPS data incorrect for southern hemisphere

Apologies: I did read your post, but I didn't realize that you were in the southern hemisphere so I didn't know that the N was wrong. That is indeed puzzling. Perhaps we are dealing with more than one bug here.

I can confirm, however, that the iPhoto bug I discussed in my post is still occurring (at least in the case i was looking at). An image I took with my iphone 3G camera the other day was imported into iPhoto on the 12th. In iPhoto, I can right-click and "show original file" for that photo, then open the photo in Preview, then go to Tools menu --> Inspector --> More info (center tab). For the original file as it was when it was imported into iphoto, the Inspector showed the longitude data as being in the western hemisphere (118 deg W). After I simply rotated the photo in iPhoto, however, a "modified" version of the photo was saved. When I right click and "show file" for the newly rotated file, the longitude now shows 118 deg (with no reference tag), which defaults to East, resulting in putting the photo in the wrong hemisphere.

So, at least in this case, the photo was geotagged correctly by the iPhone, but had its EXIF Ref tags stripped by iPhoto when I simply applied a rotation to the photo.

My proposed hypotheses (let's try to disprove these; scientific method and all):

1. Editing an iphone-geotagged photo in iPhoto strips the EXIF "Ref" tags, leaving only lon and lat values (numbers) without any reference as to North, South, East, or West. Whatever program then uses those numbers to map the file (be it Preview's Inspector or, say, Flickr's maps) uses its own defaults to decide whether a standalone longitude is east or west. In Flickr, the default appears to be East, which means that the photos that have been uploaded to Flickr after being edited by iPhoto will always get put in the Eastern Hemisphere.

At least: importing the photo through Image Capture preserves the EXIF "Ref" (N,S,E,W) tags, but editing the photo in iPhoto strips those tags away, leaving only numbers.


2. (this one I have done no tests on) The iPhone cannot successfully put a "S" EXIF Ref tag on a photo, meaning that all photos appear in the northern hemisphere only.

Message was edited by: dgalvan123

Ah. . . that is discouraging.

Can you relay exactly what you see in the EXIF data when you import it via the non-iPhoto software? That is: what is "incorrect" about it? Is it only showing up in the Northern Hemisphere? Are the EXIF "Ref" tags missing upon import?

I have finished restoring my iPhone in iTunes and my phone now shows build 5A347 and I can confirm that the problem still occurs.

I just took a photo and used image capture to import it and the LAT is still N even though I am in the southern hemisphere and the LAT should be S. The LONG is W when it should be E.

Unless someone can look into an iPhone and read the exif data directly off the image that is stored on the phone then we don't know if the issue is image capture/iphoto changing the tags or if the phone writes them incorrectly - personally I rekon it is the way the camera application uses the location services.

Either way Apple need to do something - I have done enough free trouble shooting for them.

If you scroll upwards you can see my reply that includes the detailed EXIF tags - NOTE: I am in Sydney Australia and the number are correct but they should be S and E NOT N and W.

It was pointed out further down that I neglected to mention that *I am in Sydney (southern hemisphere)* and so the problem is that although the numbers are correct the N/W should actually be S/E.

Sorry about that piece of - rather important - missing info.

Message was edited by: Brendan Daly

I'm in Japan and having the same problem.....
I took a photo with iPhone 3g in Tokyo but geotag indicated on Pacific Ocean...

It is most probably because the iPhoto app uses the UIImagePicker API internally, which strips off a lot of the EXIF Data - apparently incorrectly removing the loc/lat ref tags here and resizes the photo.

The only way in the iPhone to get the real image and retain all the Exif data is to read the NSData representing the JPEG directly from the file system. However, Third party apps are generally discouraged from this in the developer docs and it seems iPhoto suffers from using the same API

The EXIF GPS data is correct, but it has N and W instead of S and E. Other than that all the EXIF data seems to be correct upon import.

I am using the XP Camer & Scanner wizard to import the photos from my iPhone and have checked the EXIF tags with both "Exif Reader v3.0" and Adobe Photoshop 7.0

So IMHO this is definitely a problem with the way that the iPhone writes the EXIF tags. Hopefully Apple pulls their finger out and fixes this soon.

"Unless someone can look into an iPhone and read the exif data directly off the image that is stored on the phone then we don't know if the issue is image capture/iphoto changing the tags or if the phone writes them incorrectly - personally I rekon it is the way the camera application uses the location services."

----------------

Here’s a simple method to test if this is an iphone problem or a non iphone problem:

Go to the App Store and download “Airme”. It’s a free iphone app that allows you to take a picture and immediately upload it to flickr or the airme.com website. It is useful in that it includes the EXIF information with the lat/lon. So, whichever photo upload site you use, the photo will arrive with the lat/lon that the iphone tagged it with.

I just used airme to take the linked picture, and as you can see (there is a map link in the lower right of the flickr page), it was geotagged by iPhone with the correct lat lon and the correct lat/lon REF tags. (I am in Los Angeles. . . you can see exactly where by looking at the map)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dgalvan/2675407490/

This is evidence to me that my iphone 3G is geotagging correctly, but that some sets of software used to edit an imported iphone photo (definitely iPhoto, perhaps others as well) can screw it up. Geotagging has been a somewhat niche activity up to now, and there are many photo programs that are not friendly with geotagged EXIF data, but have gone unnoticed because few people were worrying about the lat/lon tags.

Brendan, could you perform the above mentioned test and see if your iphone really is geotagging incorrectly? So far, I am more inclined to believe it is the photo editing software we are using which is causing the problems, not the iPhone itself.

But I suppose it's completely possible that some iphones are geotagging correctly, and that others aren't. There is still my #2 hypothesis up there: Has anyone seen an iphone EXIF lat REF tag that is South? Or does it always tag N for North? (Being in the northern hemisphere, I can't test this.)

P.S.: this airme app is pretty cool. . . did you notice the flickr tags for the image? Those were all added automatically by airme. I guess it takes your location, including city, state, country and current weather, and automatically makes tags!

how far off was the geotag? Did it place the photo just offshore of Japan ("in the pacific ocean" is not too specific), or are you saying it placed the photo in the southern hemisphere?

Also, what software or service did you use to view the geotag info for your photo?

UPDATE:
Relevant correction here. Airme doesn't actually access any EXIF data, it actually queries the Location Services part of the iPhone 3G to get the lat/lon/time and some weather info from a separate web site, and then imports all that plus the photo into Flickr. While Airme works great in uploading a geotagged pic to Flickr, an unfortunate side effect of its method is that the picture you took with Airme will now no longer have any geotag info in its EXIF when it is saved to your camera roll. So it won't have lat/lon tags if you import it into iPhoto! Looks like we can't have our cake and eat it too. I have spoken with Airme support and they say they are working on an update that correctly deals with EXIF info. Gave me an ETA of 20 days.

Still, though, my experience has been that the iPhone 3G photos have the correct lat/lon REF tags when they are imported into iPhoto via USB cable.

I've got the same problem here in switzerland - east and west seem to be swapped.
I tried importing the image with "iPhoto" and "Image Capture". "Preview" always says the coordinates are:
47.5673,-7.60067
While they actually should be:
47.5673, 7.60067
greets

Has/could someone file a bug report for this?

Having experienced a similar problem using iPhoto and GPS-tagged photos (not from an iPhone), it would appear that the new version of iPhoto (7.1.4) fixes it.

Previously if I imported a correctly tagged photo into iPhoto and then exported it (in any way), iPhoto would often mangle the EXIF GPS data, switching east to west.

This no longer happens on, at least on the image I was using to prove it was iPhoto previously.

Still broken in iPhoto 6.0.6 (ok so I haven't upgraded). Though oddly enough Software Update did install the iLife support update today.

Downloaded 7.1.4 from software update.
The problem still exists for images taken with the iPhone. And as many pointed out it seems not to be a iPhoto-problem, as it also occurs with "Image Capture"..

Can someone confirm this?