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May 27, 2012
Released

P: Improve control over reverse-geocoded Location metadata

  • May 27, 2012
  • 50 replies
  • 3223 views

LR 4.1rc2 under Windows 7 x64The reverse-geocoding function of LR4 is a great feature and a potential time-saver, yet it can lead to some minor disasters.Specifically, there is currently no way to "stabilize" the location metadata that has been automatically filled by LR (displayed in gray italics). Editing any value by hand e.g. a misspelled City name, leads to all other fields (Country, State, Sublocation) being emptied - problematic when filters are effective on these fields, as the photo suddenly disappears and end up with partly missing location info.Possible remedies: when location info has been automatically filled by LR :- provide (only in such a case) a checkbox offering to "keep these values", so they can from then on be appear as 'normal' metadata, and be edited as such without some tricky behaviouror- make these auto-filled values separate from each other, allowing to edit one without discarding all the others. That would also allow the reverse-geocoding feature to work with any photo which has *some* location fields empty, not only those which have *all* (that is: Reverse-geocoding would always fill missing values, yet keeping any user-defined ones - let's assume photographers know better than Google where they have been shooting...)My preference would rather go to the first solution, as it appears to give more control without making the inner workings of reverse-geocoding too complex.

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    john beardsworth
    Community Expert
    john beardsworthCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    January 9, 2016
    What you have to do is select a group of images that have the same value in a field - eg Lancashire is in State. Then click the label "State" and you'll see Lancashire is listed as an option. Choosing this writes the value directly into the field, and it would be saved to xmp.

    Where this fails is if you have many images with different reverse-geotagged values in State. You have to select all the Lancashire ones, then the Yorkshire, then the..... And that's just for the State field. What's needed is a simple command Save All Reverse-Geotagged Values to IPTC Field.

    But do remember that reverse-geotagged values do get written to files exported from Lightroom.
    A
    Adobe_Fan_27
    Participant
    January 9, 2016
    I downloaded the latest trial version yesterday and spent hours trying to figure out how to write the reverse geocoded location to the files. Nothing worked. How can this be done for thousand of images at a time?

    This is such a basic function that certainly after 5 years this issue has been fixed. I am still on iView/MediaPro but would like to switch to LR if they can finally fix some of the issues incl. this one.
    hreinard
    hreinard
    Participating Frequently
    December 27, 2015
    I found that the lastest version of LR fixed the problem – but not always. I am still observing and investigating as I get new photos to tag in LR.

    Most of my photos are tagged outside of LR.
    LarryLMMMTT
    LarryLMMMTT
    Participating Frequently
    December 27, 2015
    Yeah, why can't this be fixed? I keep thinking that the next version of lightroom will allow us to quickly and easily confirm the data, which we could then (of course) edit at will. There seems to be no advantage to the "grey" data, to me.
    hreinard
    hreinard
    Participating Frequently
    September 23, 2015
    I cannot understand why adobe refuses to remove this bug! And it's not the only one...
    hreinard
    hreinard
    Participating Frequently
    August 21, 2015
    Obviously they refuse a solution....
    A
    AkaSomeOne
    Participating Frequently
    August 20, 2015
    3 years later, the merry folks at Adobe still haven't a clue as to how to write metadata back to files...
    hreinard
    hreinard
    Participating Frequently
    June 23, 2015
    Lightroom obviously did a reverse geocoding. But the data are in dark grey, can't be edited (only overwritten) and are not written to the jpg file. Other software (Media Pro, e.g.) does it without problems. The date are read by Lightroom afterwards and then they are in white letters and can be edited. Any ideas?

    hursey
    hursey
    Known Participant
    June 11, 2015
    Bueller? Bueller? Come on guys... Without being able to quickly and easily commit to the location information... whats the point of providing it?
    A
    AkaSomeOne
    Participating Frequently
    October 22, 2014
    Any news on that issue?
    As much as I value Mr Friedl's plugins, it seems overkill having to install a separate plugin only to save IPTC metadata. Something that LR definitely *can* do.

    btw: it's feasible through command line utilities... although far from straightforward (sqlite3 to grab the info from the catalog by parsing tables/values to convert to city/country/etc. strings + exiftool to write these strings back to files + 'Read metadata from files' to reimport that metadata into LR)
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