GPS coordinates have stopped working correctly in Photos for Mac

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Level 2

145 points

GPS coordinates have stopped working correctly in Photos for Mac

Hi. I use Leonie's excellent AppleScript to copy GPS coordinates from a photo. In the past I've been able to just paste those coordinates into the location field on the Info window and then press Return to correctly assign the location to the photo. I've done this hundreds of times in the past successfully. Unfortunately, pasting longer works correctly. When I paste the coordinates (e.g. 40.599442330198 -122.387387748238) into the location field, a popup menu shows the city and state/province, and pressing return assigns the centre of that city instead of the pasted GPS location. Is this working correctly for anyone on the current release of Mojave? (10.14.6 with all supplemental updates applied). The example coordinates I've provided should place the photo on Jacqueline St., in Anderson CA.

iMac 27″, macOS 10.13

Posted on Oct 22, 2020 1:10 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

léonie

Level 10

197,839 points

Oct 22, 2020 2:18 PM in response to Richard Tench

It is suddenly no longer working in any version of Photos - I am having the same problem on all three Macs with Mojave, on my Catalina Mac, and even on the Mac with the most recent Beta software. It started about two weeks ago. As it suddenly happened on any Mac and even the iPhones are having problems to display the location, I think it is a recent change on Apple's location servers.

What seems to be happening: When we enter the GPS coordinates of a place, Photos is assigning the coordinates of the closest place from the location database, not the exact the coordinates we entered.

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.

What still is working is to assign the coordinates with an Apple Script or to use Houdah Geo to assign coordinates.

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Answer 2

léonie

Level 10

197,839 points

Nov 11, 2020 2:32 AM in response to jotzet

I sent a bug report to Apple last month, Joachim, on October 11.. And some users, who contacted Apple Support, reported that the problem is known to Apple. The status message on my bug report is still showing "Recent similar reports: None", status "Open".

I am sure, that Apple is aware of the problem, but not so sure, if it is a bug or an unfortunate new intended behaviour.

It would be a disaster for landscape photography, if we could only enter locations precisely, that have an address and not our coordinates from GPS locations. Just in case it should be the new, intended behaviour, it may help, if more users were sending feedback and explain why we need precise locations outside the big cities and off the beaten tracks and request an improvement.The feedback form is here: Feedback - Photos - Apple

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Answer 3

jotzet

Level 1

9 points

Nov 15, 2020 1:49 AM in response to léonie

Dear léonie,

Again thanks for your answer - I really appreciate your help throughout all the discussions around managing Photos within the Apple ecosystem (be it Scripting or any other aides/tools/etc...), I often stumbled upon your username on some many similar issues I have with Photos (e.g. face tagging is nagging me at that time too) :-)

As mentioned in a previous post:

Is there an impact / more positive effect, if me mention the Feedback ID in each others Feedback Tickets? I don't know, if this is against Apple's policies, but it might be worth a try. Mine is also still showing "Similar Reports: None / Resolution: Open".

Thanks,

Joachim

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