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

Well this is really odd. I've just put in the coordinates for Greewich London, and Photos has put the pin in the middle of the north sea - about 400 miles away. Seems messed up to me.

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 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.

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.

OK - where is the official bug report page :-)

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:

It seems to work OK when I use houdahGeo to geocode.

Could it be using DD.mmsssssss?

No, DD.mmsssss doesn't work either.

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.

Keith, may I ask you a question? I am also relying heavily on HoudahGeo for entering the metadata before importing photos to Photos. But I am still having HoudahGeo 5. It keeps nagging me to upgrade to version 6. Is the upgrade worth the money? I tested the free trial, but the new features cannot be tested fully. As version 5 is still working well, I would prefer to wait for the Big Sur Release before deciding to upgrade or not.

I have kept upgraded, but haven't really noticed any functional improvements. It always just works.

I have asked them to add the "imports" view from Photos, if available, since that is usually the easiest way to get at the images you recently imported. But they haven't yet taken my suggestion.

TL; DR;

I think you are fine waiting.