How to reverse geocode in LR4 if image is already tagged with latitude/longitude

[Guest]

I've seen Terry White's video about geocoding by importing a .gpx file, but what if I've already got the latitude and longitude, and what I need is for Lightroom 4 to look up the city, state, country, etc.  Is this possible?

[Nina_Fox]

Same question here.  If I go to a image that has the latitude and longitude already in the GPS coordinates, Lightroom 4 will not allow me to Auto-Tag Photos to reverse geocode the images with the City, State, Country.  The Auto-Tag Photos menu is greyed out.

[kingstonimages]

Bump.  I am experiencing the same problem here.  If I drag a image from the filmstrip onto the map in Lightroom 4 - LR adds the GPS coordinates to the image, but will not allow me to then Auto-Tag Photos to reverse geocode the City, State, Country info.

[Jeff Schewe]

Just to be clear, you do have internet access on the machine you are using, right? Reverse geotagging uses Google Maps engine to look up the locations based on the GPS coordinates...

Otherwise, not sure why it's not working for some people. Works here (Mac 10.7.3/10.6.8)

[kingstonimages]

Yes.  I just checked internet connection and is working great.  The google maps feature in the "Map" module works great and overlays the images on the map with the geo coordinates.  I am just not able to reverse geocode the GPS coordinates into the City, State, Country location fields using the Auto-Tag Photos command in the Map module.  I did enable Reverse Geocode in LR.

[kingstonimages]

Some extra info for the thread.  iPhone shots that have GPS coordinates already embedded in them from the camera show up as they should on the map in the "Map" module - but the Map Modle will not allow me to reverse geocode the City, State, Country info.

[RA5040ARD]

If any of the location fields have any data in them, LR will not get the location data.  You could check to see if there is anything in there: even a space will stop the reverse geocode. 

It's pretty stupid cause say you reverse geocode, then you put in the Sublocation manually, then you move the image on the map - all location information gone.  Move the image pointer back to it's original location - no location data (except for your manually entered sublocation, of course).  Makes you wonder who tests these programs.

[Lee Jay]

Posted in the LR4 forum is the idea below:

Uncheck the reverse geocoding checkboxes in the catalog settings.

Restart LR.

Enable the checkboxes.

Now it works.

Well, it has worked for the person that posted that, and for myself.

[Guest]

Did not work for me.

[Lee Jay]

Try it now.

[Guest]

I did.  The Auto-Tag Photos is greyed out.  (The only related command which is available is Load Tracklog.

[Lee Jay]

Forget the menu, just add some images to the map and see if the reverse geotagging works.

[Guest]

Maybe I'm misunderstanding something.  I have an image which already has lat/long. info.  When I enter the Map module, the image is already displayed on the map.  What II'd like to do is have LR fill in the other location information (city, state, etc.) without overwriting the lat/long/altitude info.

[Lee Jay]

At the moment, I'm not sure how to do that.  So, just as a test, please remove the coordinates and then put them back by dragging the image back to the map and see if the location information gets filled in.

[Guest]

It fills in the City, State/Province, Country and ISO Country Code fields, but the text it fills in is light grey and in italics, and it doesn't seem to be saved when I try to save metadata to file.  In fact, if I click in any of these fields in the Metadata panel of the Library module, the filled in text disappears and I have a blank field to type in.

[Lee Jay]

jalperin wrote:

It fills in the City, State/Province, Country and ISO Country Code fields, but the text it fills in is light grey and in italics, and it doesn't seem to be saved when I try to save metadata to file.  In fact, if I click in any of these fields in the Metadata panel of the Library module, the filled in text disappears and I have a blank field to type in.

I believe this is the correct behavior.  The light italicized text means it has come from Google and hasn't yet been "comitted".  You can click on the word to "commit" that data.

[Guest]

Where is the "commit"?

[helen_gossweiler]

jalperin wrote:

Where is the "commit"?

Click on the label of the field.

Beat

[Lee Jay]

Either click on the field labels or type in your own data.

[Nina_Fox]

Uncheck the reverse geocoding checkboxes in the catalog settings.

Restart LR.

Enable the checkboxes.

Now it works.

This fixed the problem for any photo that does not have existing GPS coordinates embedded.  Two continuing problems:

1 - Sadly all of my images that already have GPS coordinates embedded (iPhone shots and dSLR shots with a GPS unit) will not auto fill the City, State, Country fields. 

2 - Having to click on the City, State, Country fields to commit them makes the feature of little value as it saves no time.  I can select images in grid mode and batch append the individual fields faster than clicking into the fields to commit.  I imagine this can be fixed by a preference that allows for some type of auto commit of the Google appended metadata.

[kingstonimages]

Bump

Nina Fox wrote:

Uncheck the reverse geocoding checkboxes in the catalog settings.

Restart LR.

Enable the checkboxes.

Now it works.

This fixed the problem for any photo that does not have existing GPS coordinates embedded.  Two continuing problems:

1 - Sadly all of my images that already have GPS coordinates embedded (iPhone shots and dSLR shots with a GPS unit) will not auto fill the City, State, Country fields. 

2 - Having to click on the City, State, Country fields to commit them makes the feature of little value as it saves no time.  I can select images in grid mode and batch append the individual fields faster than clicking into the fields to commit.  I imagine this can be fixed by a preference that allows for some type of auto commit of the Google appended metadata.

[Guest]

Nina, I completely agree with you.

[Guest]

Ah. Thanks.   Now I understand that clicking on each individual field label will commit the value filled in by the reverse geocoding.  (I misunderstood earlier and thought there was some sort of "commit" button in the LR interface.) 

Sadly, it appears that there is still no answer to my original question as to whether it is possible to have Lightroom do the reverse geocoding lookup using the lat/long. already present in the file.  I don't want to dump this data and then try to individually drag the images to the map.  If LR can't do this, perhaps there is some other geocoding software which can do it outside of Lightroom.

[Lee Jay]

Like I said, "At the moment, I'm not sure how to do that.".

Still working on figuring that out.

Regardless, for much more sophisticated geocoding in LR, look at Jeffrey Friedl's plugin.

http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/gps

[RA5040ARD]

This has to be a bug.  The only way to write the location information to xmp is to click on each field label one at a time.  This has to be done whether the GPS data is entered by placing the image on the map from Lightroom or getting the GPS data from a tracklog.

What's more, if the image is opened in Photoshop (from Lightroom) the location data is missing unless it has been saved as above (ie one field at a time).  So right now the location data is absolutely useless.

Fortunately Jeffrey Friedl comes to the rescue!!  The reverse geo-encoding (Reverse Geo tab) works perfectly once the photo has the gps coordinates (which can be put in through the jFriedl plugin or from Lightroom - or any other way).

What works quite well is to load the tracklog and Auto-tag the images - and then just run the jFriedl Reverse Geo to get the location data (which is more complete than what LR gets anyway).