when I enter a location for a picture, Photos changes it to a different location

The Apple developers are looking occasionally at these forums, particularly after a software update. But you cannot rely on them to read each and every post. It is far safer to use the provided feedback tools, if you want to be sure that your bug reports will reach the developer team. You may even get a reply and follow up requests for more details, if you use a developer account.

• For a quick report use the feedback form. Feedback - Photos - Apple
• For a detailed report with screenshots and other test protocols and system logs use the feedback assistant from a free developer account or the or a beta tester membership.

How to get a developer account: Detailed and Effective Bug Reporting - Apple Community

Amazing! Brilliant! Thank you so much! Yeeppee!

For those who need to know (I didn't previously), you can add a script to the top menu bar with this: https://support.apple.com/guide/script-editor/access-scripts-using-the-script-menu-scpedt27975/

[EDIT] If any of you know of a more elegant / convenient way of installing & triggering the script, could you share?

I kinda improved your script to better suit my needs on 2 aspects:

• When selecting several photos in Photos, they will all be set to the same location (therefore asking for lat,long only once), matching the behaviour of the Information pane that we've known.
• Actually display an alert when there is no photo selected (required a try/catch when using the Scripts menu).

tell application "Photos"
	try
		set selectedImages to (get selection)
		if selectedImages is {} then
			error "Please select an image."
		end if
		set response to display dialog "New location:" default answer "" buttons {"Cancel", "OK"} default button "OK" with icon note
		set newLocationString to text returned of response
		if ((button returned of response) = "OK") and (newLocationString is not "") then
			set AppleScript's text item delimiters to ","
			set theLocList to every text item of newLocationString
			repeat with theImage in selectedImages
				set the location of theImage to theLocList
			end repeat
			display alert "New location set to: " & newLocationString
		end if
	on error errorMsg number errorNumber
		display alert errorMsg buttons {"OK"}
	end try
end tell

There are several ways. The quick and easy way is the feedback form. Feedback - Photos - Apple

Or, if you want to file a detailed bug report, with attachments and test samples, you need a free developer account. It is worth it, see: Detailed and Effective Bug Reporting | Apple Support Communities

Or, if you are a Beta tester or seed tester, you can use the Feedback Assistent:

How are you able to view the status of your feedback? Whenever I post to Apple Product Feedback https://www.apple.com/feedback/ it goes into some kind of black hole with no way to get updates? Thanks.

[EDIT] And I don’t get any Feedback ID for reference.

Still unfixed (mad)... I have access to the Feedback Assistant, so I submitted the following 'feedback' (hum... bug report). This feedback is related to the publicly deployed version 11.0.1 (20B50) of macOS (not any beta version), so here I am *not* posting anything that would be considered confidential under the NDA rules of the beta tester agreement articles 5 & 6. However the Feedback ID would seemingly fall under these rules, so I'm afraid I'm not allowed to share it for cross-references.

Unable to set location of Photos with GPS coordinates

Description - Since mid-October 2020 approximately, it is impossible to use GPS coordinates (lat,long) to set the location of photos in the macOS Photos app. The Photos app incorrectly changes the location to the nearest city center instead. This is a regression from previous behaviour which occurs in various macOS versions and was not related to any specific macOS update, pointing instead to the malfunction of some cloud-based geolocation API. Check this discussion thread for confirmation and further examples https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251905264?answerId=253951549022

Very often, travelling locations do *not* have a valid street address or nearby POI, which means GPS coordinates are the only way to place those photos on a map. In such case there is no workaround available and this is a critical bug. Please fix!

Steps to reproduce - Open the macOS Photos app, open a photo, press Cmd-I to get photo information, input GPS coordinates in the Location field - for example 42.250024,11.769321

Expected results - As worked previously, the photo should be placed on the map at the location of the GPS coordinates. In this example: within the Necropoli dei Monterozzi.

Actual results - The photo is placed on the map at the city center of the nearest city, or alternatively at some random location. In this example: the photo is moved on the map to the city center of Tarquinia.

I can confirm this problem. The pin on the tiny location map is in the wrong position, moved to the center of the city.

• I enter 37.580627 -122.324113
• and when I read the coordinates back from the photo with AppleScript, they have been changed to 37.547541 -122.314571

And the photos will be exported with the wrong GPS coordinates, many miles off.

This is a disaster.

It seems, we should not use Photos for geocoding, for the time being.

Still not working properly - but is vastly improved from when this first cropped up in October.

Then I couldn't even put in the locations of Greenwich Observatory in London without it putting the pin in the north sea. Now I've tried that (fine) and a number of offshore locations to the north east of the UK, and it seemed to get them fine.

However I've just tried the location in the screenshots in Chesapeake Bay, and you can see the result...

That is quite an error.

Even worse - I can go as far inland (USA) to longitude -80 (that is almost to Charlston) and it still decides it is the middle of the North Atlantic. If I put the pin directly on Charlston - it gets it right.

Finally I found a stopgap workaround for this -- to use AppleScript like below:

tell application "Photos"
	set selectedImages to (get selection)
	if selectedImages is {} then
		error "Please select an image."
	end if
	repeat with theImage in selectedImages
		set title to the name of theImage
		if not (exists (title)) then
			set title to the filename of theImage
		end if
		set response to display dialog "Edit Location of " & title default answer "" buttons {"Don't Edit", "Edit"} default button "Edit" with icon note
		if (button returned of response) = "Edit" then
			set newLocationString to text returned of response
			if not newLocationString = "" then
				set AppleScript's text item delimiters to ","
				set theLocList to every text item of newLocationString
				set the location of theImage to theLocList
				display alert "New location of " & title & ": " & newLocationString
			end if
		end if
	end repeat
end tell

Done a bit more investigation. You can put in the same coordinates numerically and get different results

51.0 0.009800 gives the English channel

However, 51 0.009800 gives "no results"

and

51 0.0098 gives somwhere in Turkey.

I suspect it is not putting the coordinates on a map, and then finding the place - I'm guessing it must have a huge lookup table of places and their coordinates, and is messing up the interpretation of the numbers for the lookup, or the table itself is broken.

I just tested on several Macs: The same problem persists on the Macs with macOS 10.14.6 Mojave as well, not only on my Mac with macOS 10.15 Catalina. So it seems to be more a problem with Apple's location database than with the current catalina update.

When I assign this place: -54.63698 -67.764359 (Lago Escondido, close to Ushuaia, Argentina), Photos will move the pin into the center of the South Pacific Ocean and change the GPS coordinates accordingly to -24.8915 -136.5752054. That is nearly 30° farther north and 60° farther west. The entered GPS coordinates are discarded and lost, unless I copy them to the description field.

Totally, I have a Foretrex 601 that saves a gpx file. After I import into Photos, I launch HoudahGeo, select the images I want to use, drop the .gpx file into Houdah geo.

In fact, the images I did yesterday had a really screwed up camera clock: Wrong time zone and a lot of drift. In HoudahGeo, I used an image I took of the clock on my Foretrex, and it readjusted all the times for Photos.

Same irritating bug here, I confirm it's quite recent as GPS coordinates worked OK previously. I submitted feedback too.

Maybe it's linked to the imminent release of macOS 11 Big Sur? If it's not fixed till then, we'll see if the new OS has the same bug (although I'm not too keen to jump early on new releases).

Keep sending feedback to Apple, so it will be fixed, when Big Sur is released. It is strange, that suddenly all my Macs with all system versions, plus the iPhone and the iPad are having problems with the Places in Photos. It looks like the central servers with the location names are causing the problems, not the current Catalina update.