Otherwise, what will happen is that after first displaying the correct location on the map for photos, the next time, it will arbitrarily assign to them one of the Places in your database.

In my case, they display as being Almudena, in Madrid. But the actual photo file has the correct GPS coordinates, which are far different than for Almudena. But iPhoto in the Extended Get Info will show the Almudena GPS coordinates instead.

If you export to a site like Picasa Web Galleries or to another application, the correct location will be displayed on the map.

The problem occurs if I don’t manually assign it a place name. But you use a GPS logger and you go through the trouble of using another application to sync and embed GPS data into the EXIF of hundreds of photo files. When first imported, iPhoto shows the correct map location and labels the photos “photo place.”

Unless you change that label and give it a more specific Places name, the next time you open, iPhoto assigns these photos as Almudena.

So iPhoto is impractical and of little use for managing and displaying a large volume of photos with GPS data in the EXIF.

Instead, I’d be better off exporting photos to another application or a site like Picasa and relying on a keyword like say Paris to show the hundreds of locations on a map of Paris where I might take photos.

In fact, even the bundled Gisteq application, which I use to embed the GPS in the EXIF, is better for displaying not just the map but also the place name as it will look up Wikipedia to describe well-known locations near where the photo was taken.

I coded the last two days a small perl-script which does a bit what iPhoto09 does:

http://renekmueller.com/Computer_Diary/1240381680/Automatically_Geotag_Photos_without_GPS

or http://the-labs.com/GeoTag/

It uses a public domain source file, cities1000.txt or allCountries.txt – and converts it into a sqlite-db, and then lookups go fast. It finds locations, list lat/long, and displays total distance of looked up locations.

I used it to geotag my photos which I commented with location information. I also support a simple interpolation of location based on timestamp of the photos.

Rene
renekmueller.com

I used and I liked very much your Geotagger, thank you for sharing it!

I try to contribute my 2 eurocents (as I’m from Italy) with a little thing I discovered, looking at iPhoto databases like you did.

I found one more interesting table.

If you inspect the iPhotoAux.db database you can see ther’s a table called SpGpsTrackPoints (fields: primaryKey INTEGER, points BLOB).

I am pretty sure that the primaryKey field will be used to estabilish a 1-to-many relationship with the SpGpsTrack table you have discovered in iPhotoMain.db.

As the points field is a BLOB it sounds to me that it will be used to store entire track files, hopefully in GPX, KML or in any other “known” format.

So I guess Picasa and others who write export plugins for iPhoto will have to add similar functionality to their software, unless again, Apple is hiding that interface from 3rd-party developers like Craig.

I have a bunch of pictures from Switzerland a couple of years ago. Unfortunately, I will have to manually locate them and I can only approximate the locations.

Kind of reminds you of those trips so while it’s a lot of work, it has its rewards.

Or maybe a reason to go back to Switzerland and a lot of these other places, to tag with a logger.

Greetings from Switzerland, here’s the Link on how to rebuild the Library:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2638

Or maybe since Flickr uploads are integrated, they share with Flickr.

Strange that they’d use Google Maps within iPhoto but not work with Picasa or Panaramio.