Geotagging & previously direct-downloaded photos

[vtluu]

Hi all,

I just got back from a 10-day trip to France where I used Direct downloading to transfer photos from my Eye-Fi X2 Pro 8GB-equipped Nikon D5000 to an Android tablet (and from the tablet to Dropbox when WiFi availability allowed). I noticed the photos didn't have any geotag info attached, and based on what I read about how Eye-Fi geotagging works, that's normal if I used Direct downloads. Fine. So, per another posting I saw here, I "touched" the photos (updated the JPEG file timestamps) to force them to re-download, this time to my laptop. That worked, and all the photos indicate that they're geotagged, but when I check the location they're all tagged with my location in San Jose, CA (my house, where I was when I re-downloaded the photos), rather than the location where the photos were actually taken.

My understanding was that the Eye-Fi card takes a snapshot of visible WiFi APs at the time the photo is taken and burns it into the EXIF data, and the Eye-Fi software parses said data when the photo is downloaded and updates the EXIF with actual geotag coordinates. If that's the case then why are the geotags on my re-downloaded photos incorrect? Is the original WPS raw data still in the EXIF attached to the JPEG on the SD card, or has it been blown away forever? And if the wireless network data is still in the on-card JPEG files, is there some 3rd-party software that can read it and re-run the WPS query?

Thanks,

- Tam

[vtluu]

Thanks to Eye-Fi for a quick response to my support inquiry:

When you "touched" the image, Eye-Fi thought this was a new image. Because of this, it searched for network in the area at the time it was edited which it was it geotagged at your house. There is no way to have it re-check for geodata from the location it was originally taken without going back to that location.

Whoops! It's not the end of the world if the geodata is gone forever, but it'd be nice if I could somehow retrieve it. I wonder if it might still be embedded in the photos I originally direct-downloaded onto my Android tablet?