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A
andreww99149023
Known Participant
October 15, 2024
Question

Geolocation by County

  • October 15, 2024
  • 1 reply
  • 258 views

I have hundreds of thousands of photographs taken over fifty years in a Lightroom CC catalog. The normal metadata fields for all images include, among other things, the date/time and longitude/latitude.  I can see the locations in the Lightroom map module. 

A) My current project requires county data. Since there is no "county" field, I have been inserting that data into an otherwise unused field. Due to the quantities involved, doing this manually for older images or where the city/sublocation may straddle county lines is unrealistic.

B) I need to generate captions from this metadata showing "year-sublocation-county-state." Future projects may require some other caption configuration. In the Print module, I can do what I want, but that does not generate durable metadata.

Neither of these objectives seems to be included in Lightroom CC. There is a commercial product that might handle the county issue, but they want $1,000/month so I am clearly not their target audience. I have not found an available add-on that can generate captions from metadata.

Any suggestions?

This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

johnrellis
johnrellis
Legend
October 21, 2024

"My current project requires county data. "

 

County isn't part of the IPTC metadata standard, which is why you don't see such a field in LR. I'm very familiar with LR plugins and various geo apps individuals use for photos, and I haven't seen one that maps GPS coordinates to County.  There are likely cheaper paid services for mapping to County names, e.g. perhaps geonames.org.  But you'd need to do some scripting or import/export of CSV files to export the data from LR, append the County names, and then import back into LR.

 

"I need to generate captions from this metadata showing "year-sublocation-county-state.""

 

The Write Data Field command of the Bag-o-Goodies plugin can do this.

A
andreww99149023Author
Known Participant
October 21, 2024

I was not familiar with Friedl's stuff, so thanks for that. I downloaded the Bag-o-Goodies plugin, and I will experiment with it over the next few days. It looks like the right tool.

As it happens, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has a downloadable spreadsheet listing all the counties (67) and the cities (2,560) in them. You would think that spreadsheet solves my database problem. Unfortunately, some towns straddle county lines and are listed under both counties, and there are multiple places with the same names in different counties. Luckily, there are not so many problem places to manually adjust.

You are who you pretend to be. So be careful who you pretend to be. -- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
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