http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20080821073713119

See the following image (courtesy of digiKam) for a pratical explanation: http://img403.imageshack.us/img403/8272/iphonewronggpsjt8.png

Of course, you need to have photos taken east of Greenwich to see this problem (or maybe south of Equator).

(If flickr does not position photo at all, it’s likely because you don’t have auto positioning turned on – check your flickr account settings)

Google reads the exif perfectly and asks if you want to use the data.
No problems there at all, however Flickr seems to do nothing w/ the data

I discovered that in iPhoto, if I drag the picture out of iPhoto and inspect the LAT LON, there is no negative sign on, but if I select “show origional file” and open that in Preview, there is a negative sign putting me in the right hemisphere.

I just took some test photos with my 2.0 iPhone and downloaded it directly from the phone (without using any tools, just plain WinSCP from the filesystem itslef)

The GPS ref fields are not set correctly and as a result, my photo is shown to be somewhere off the coast of California.

Resetting the sign of the Longitude to the correct side of the planet using GeoSetter cured the issue.

– kl –

and thanks about the exif-stripping info of mobilemail.app. i was wondering why the info doesn’t get trough to flickr…

So apple needs to: fix the mail program so it doesn’t strip the EXIF, and relase an update for iPhoto and UIImagePicker that avoids EXIF stripping.

“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”

3.) Airme:
Airme is a free app available in the App Store for the iPhone 3G that allows you to take a picture on the iPhone 3G and then immediately upload it to Flickr. When you take pic through Airme, the program does not write or read any EXIF data whatsoever. Instead, it queries the location services part of your iPhone and grabs the lat and lon data from there, automatically importing that data, as well as the photo itself, into your flickr account. The result is you can successfully and easily upload a correctly geotagged photo to Flickr. The catch is that you cannot yet do this with photos already on your camera roll, only photos you take using the Airme app. (Airme staff says they will fix this in the next version, due out within the month.) Yet another (hopefully temporary) problem is that, since Airme doesn’t write any EXIF data, the picture you took using Airme that gets saved onto your camera roll on your iPhone will not have any lat/lon values in its EXIF data. So after using Airme, the only geotagged version of your photo in existence is on Flickr. The one you import to iPhoto from your camera roll will not have any lat/lon info at all.

First, the iPhoto related problem, and a couple of variants on it that are still confusing me

1.) The iPhoto problem is indeed happening (at least to me). That is, when you import a geotagged photo (from the iPhone 3G or from any other source that gives the JPG its EXIF lat/lon and lat/lon REF tags), that EXIF data is preserved, and viewable when you select the photo and go to Photos–> Get Info. However, when you modify or edit the photo (rotating it, cropping it, etc.), iPhoto now refers to a modified version of the JPEG, and stripps out the REF tags, leaving it unclear whether a photo is, say, at 118 deg W lon or at 118 deg E lon. Subsequently uploading such a photo to Flickr will result in Flickr making the assumption that the 118 (null) value in the EXIF lon tag means 118 deg E, and you get the wrong hemisphere problem. Note that you won’t be able to tell that iPhoto has stripped the REF tags from the EXIF when using Photos–> Get Info, because iPhoto only caches the EXIF data for displaying in the Get Info window at the original import, and any subsequent changes to the EXIF data are not properly reflected in the Get Info window. To see whether the EXIF REF tags have been stripped, you need to select the photo in iPhoto, right-click (ctrl-click) and go to “Show File”. You will then be shown the JPG file in Finder. Open the JPG in preview and go to Tools –> Inspector, and then click the center tab to see the location and whether the REF tags are there. If you see “(null)”, then the REF tags have been stripped. Also, in iPhoto, you can right-click on the same photo and choose “Show Original File” and do the same thing in Preview. This usually (in my experience) reveals that the REF tags are still preserved in the original, unmodified photo, but not in the modified photo.

side note: There is an interesting complaint here: http://www.flickr.com/groups/geotagging/discuss/72157600040087961/#comment72157606300827353 which implies that perhaps iPhoto or iPhone is simply giving the incorrect REF tag to begin with. IE: a photo taken in the Netherlands (E lon) is given W lon REF tags by either iPhoto or iPhone (unclear which).

There are also some complaints here:
http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=7668654#7668654
that imply that the iPhone only gives out N and W values for the lat/lon REF tags, no S or E values. I live in the U.S., so I can’t test for this problem, but those in Australia and Europe seem to be having it.

annoyed.

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.

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

This is evidence to me that the iphone 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.

Duane, 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.