Geotagging Trouble

Geotagging in Aperture is an epic fail if you bother to sync your camera and GPS clocks. I use exiftool prior to import. Put your image files and the GPS tracklog in the same directory, pop open a terminal window, and do:

$ exiftool -overwrite_original_in_place -geotag trackname.gpx *.ORF

Replace ORF with the extension of your raw/JPEG files.

Note that Aperture cannot write geo-coordinates to raw files. Exported JPEGs or TIFFs will contain this info, but relocated masters will not contain it.

In summary, don't use Aperture for geotagging.

I agree with Andreas Yankopolus tag the files before importing them. Exiftool is very good solution for this.

However if you what to try and figure out what is going on in Aperture could you explain what you mean by

the rest are all over the place.

Are they all per the map and not on the track at all. Or are they on the track but not in the correct positions?

I'd suggest as a test to try doing this in a new empty library and if it still fails there to try it after log gin in as a new user in a new Aperture library. This will at least help pinpoint where the problem is. Post the results back.

But again I think you should tag the images before importing.

regards

Andreas is right; it is much more convenient to do the geocoding before importing the image files into Aperture for the reasons stated. But the geotagging in Aperture should work.

My camera’s (Nikon D610) clock is perfectly in sync with my GPS. I’m importing the GPX track into Aperture.

Have you set the timezones correctly on import, mike? If you do not set the camera timezone in the Import panel, Aperture will default the timezone to the timezone of the system time, and this can cause a time shift of several hours if the camera time and the system time do not match.

The timezone of the track should match the timezone of the images you set on import.

When you dragged the images to the tracks, did you manage to make the time difference shown in the panel below the pin close to zero (0 hours, 0 minutes)?