No GeoTag Data in Aperture or iPhoto (but there in Picasa!)

[pjgrand]

Hi-

I have a Canon T3i with the Eye-Fi X2 Pro Card.

I'm taking lots of photos and have no problem transferring them to the computer.

When I open the files in Picasa and of the GeoTagging data is there.

As soon as I try to open the photos (import) in either Aperture or iPhoto - the GeoTagging data is lost.

Is there a reason why? Does Eye-Fi not play well with Apple programs?

Help!!!!

Thank you!

[sasimpson]

I'm having a similar problem. Just got a ProX2 and I can't get Aperture 3 to import the geotagging data. Shows up in the dumped files and in the EyeFi Center fine.

[codingmonkey]

I observed the same behavior but only recently - everything worked fine before. I guess Apple changed something with the aperture 3.1.3 update, are you also using this version?

I tried to find out what exactly changed using the exiftool for OS X (http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/). Using the tool to view the EXIF information you can see that the Eye-Fi software indeed writes it into the file. When I used it to write the GPS information, using the following command

exiftool -gpslatitude="X X X.XX" -gpslatituderef=X -gpslongitude="X X X.XX" -gpslongituderef=X FILE

it gets recognized by aperture. The information however is the same as before, only written in different metadata-fields I guess.

Is the Eye-Fi Support active in this forum or should I write to the support?

[helgerg]

I have exactly the same problem. Some more information:

EXIF from the Eye-Fi processed file;
GPS Latitude : 33 deg 56' 42.00" N
GPS Latitude Ref : North
GPS Longitude : 118 deg 22' 43.00" W
GPS Longitude Ref : West
GPS Position : 33 deg 56' 42.00" N, 118 deg 22' 43.00" W

EXIF from a photo taken with my iPhone:
GPS Latitude : 59 deg 56' 57.60" N
GPS Longitude : 10 deg 46' 25.20" E
GPS Position : 59 deg 56' 57.60" N, 10 deg 46' 25.20" E

For me it seems like Eye-Fi and iPhone creates the same information format for GPS Latiude, GPS Longitude and GPS Position, so i do not understand why it is not working.

Also, I have tried to upload the Eye-Fi file to Flickr, and there it geotags correctly.

[helgerg]

It seems like the error is that Eye-FI uses " (quotation mark) as sign for minutes, while Aperture requires '' (double apostrophe)

[berend]

It seems like the error is that Eye-FI uses " (quotation mark) as sign for minutes, while Aperture requires '' (double apostrophe)

The punctuation marks are visualized by the various viewing applications and are not part of the actual EXIF data. All of the components of the coordinates (i.e. degrees, minutes and seconds) are inserted into the EXIF header as an implicit fractional data of the form N/M and is essentially "floating point" data.

Punctuation is a mere artifact of the visualization and cannot have to do with Aperture's inability to show the coordinates. Out of curiousity, have you tried contacting Apple support to see if they have any comments on why Aperture may not be displaying the coordinates, given other viewers are fine with them?

Berend

[helgerg]

Thank you for the reply berend. What I did to make it work was;

use exiftool to extract geolatitude and geolongitude from my JPG-files. Then I copied this to Excel, used search and replace to replace " with '', and a macro to create exiftool commands to update the EXIF-data for the files. This made it work both in Apples Preview-app and Aperture.

I will try to contact Apple support.

[TimmyGUNZ]

Add me to the list of people having problems with iPhoto. If I upload the images directly to Flickr, the GeoTagging data is there, but iPhoto is not registering it for some reason.

[dandov]

Same problem as above with Aperture. Any update other than find and replace manually?

[jsun]

What versions of Mac OS X are you all running? Is everyone with this issue on OS X 10.6.8 and 10.7?

Please see if the geotags are visible for relayed photos. To do this:
- Make sure you have Relayed Transfers enabled in the card settings under Transfer Mode (if you have an X2 card, just enable Eye-Fi View).
- Quit Eye-Fi Center and Eye-Fi Helper, or disconnect your Mac from the network (unplug/disable the network, turn the Mac off or put it to sleep).
- Take some photos and wait for them to upload over your wi-fi network. (You can check http://center.eye.fi to see if they are uploading.)
- Once they have uploaded from the card, restart Helper (or bring your Mac back online) and wait for the photos to download to the Mac. Do the images you receive display geotags now in iPhoto/Aperture/Preview? If not, check Eye-Fi Center and make sure they received geotags.

Alternately, enable Eye-Fi View and upload some photos as you normally do. Visit http://center.eye.fi , make sure the location is listed (click the "i" icon beneath the large thumbnail), and download the image(s) from the site. Open them in Preview/iPhoto/Aperture and see if the location is shown.

Another option is to upload over a different network than the one your Mac is connected to.

If these methods work, I have a feeling that Apple "updated" something in 10.6.8 and it no longer parses the geotag data embedded by Eye-Fi Helper.

If you know someone with 10.6.7 or earlier, please send them one of your geotagged photos (or post it here) and see if the location data displays in their Preview, iPhoto, or Aperture.

Are all of your old Eye-Fi photos now showing up as location-less as well in Apple's programs?


[Edit 8/26/2011: more details on workarounds to try]

[TimmyGUNZ]

Are all of your old Eye-Fi photos now showing up as location-less as well in Apple's programs?

I've been having this issue on both 10.6.8 as well as 10.7. I don't use Aperature but I can confirm that iPhoto is no longer recognizing my Geotags. If I upload the files onto Flickr or Picasa, they can read the geotag data just fine.

[backer]

Just bought the Eye-fi Pro X2 and trying it out, notice the same problem here, kinda kick in the balls because for me this is one of the most important Eye-fi functions to get geotags into iPhoto.

Mac OS X 10.6.8
iPhoto "11 (9.1.5)
Latest card firmware (updated 2011-08-08)

If there's a parse problem when exporting photos to iPhoto the Eye-fi software should be able to have that as a quick fix?

Try 1. NO SUCCESS
Have everything setup, take a photo. Turn on Eye-fi helper. Wait until it have geo tagged the image. Open iTunes and check image, it has no geotag.

Try 2. SUCCESS
Turn off Eye-fi helper, Take a photo and wait a while (maybe 1min) so it's uploaded. Turn on Eye-fi helper so the image gets downloaded. Then open iPhoto, now there's a geotag.

[misan]

Same problem here: iPhoto 9.1.5 ignores the geolocation data. It was working till the last update, now all my new picture's geolocation is ignored. exiftool shows it correctly. There is no " or '' in the exif data in the JPG file, values are enconded like below (comma separated).

00002c60 66 3a 47 50 53 4c 6f 6e 67 69 74 75 64 65 3d 22 |f:GPSLongitude="|
00002c70 32 2c 35 35 2c 34 30 57 22 20 65 78 69 66 3a 47 |2,55,40W" exif:G|
00002c80 50 53 4c 61 74 69 74 75 64 65 3d 22 34 33 2c 31 |PSLatitude="43,1|
00002c90 35 2c 34 35 4e 22 20 65 78 69 66 3a 47 50 53 56 |5,45N" exif:GPSV|
00002ca0 65 72 73 69 6f 6e 49 44 3d 22 20 2e 20 2e 22 20 |ersionID=" . ." |

I guess it is a parsing problem on Apple side. It would be nice if Eye-Fi tells Apple about the problem for a quick fix.

Cheers,

Miguel Sánchez

[chris.mathrusse]

You've got to be kidding! I bought this damn memory card specifically for the geo tagging capability and now I find it doesn't work! What a rip off! Why the F*** do they promote this friggin thing if it does work? I've tried all the suggestions listed on this thread but there is no geo information associate to the photo; on the memory card, on my file system or on Picasa!

I WANT MY MONEY BACK!!!!!!!!

[felipe23]

guys i really expect u to make this work.

the only reason i bought the eye-fi card was geotagging. wireless transfer is bleedingly slow compared to sticking the sd-card into my macbook.
so YOU should be working with apple to resolve this issue for your customers.

aperture and iphoto are definitely the most-used mac-applications for working with photos and that means when they release a new version you have to check if eye-fi still works.
of course it sucks that they changed something what worked before but at the end of the day it's YOUR responsibility to ensure your product works with the standard photo-apps.

i'm really frustrated right now and i'll definitely give back my eye-fi card if you can't come up with a solution. i'd at least expect a workaround with some apple script which reparses the exif headers to make them aperture compatible or something. please just do something.

[chris.mathrusse]

I've been playing with this all morning and even built and installed the exiftool. The end result is that there is no geo information on the photo that is on the memory card. It simply isn't there and its not on the photos that wirelessly transferred to my Mac. So where is the geo information? To me, this product seems to be an absolute waste of money. I agree with felipe23, the wireless transfer is too slow to be of any use and that wasn't the reason I bought this product. I wanted the geo information to be placed onto each photo. And blaming the problem on Apple is simply lame. It is your responsibility to ensure that the functionality that your product is "suppose to provide" functions correctly. From what I can see, the problem isn't with OS X Lion but rather with the Eye-Fi product because there isn't any geo information on any of the images.

[berend]

Same problem here: iPhoto 9.1.5 ignores the geolocation data. It was working till the last update, now all my new picture's geolocation is ignored. exiftool shows it correctly. There is no " or '' in the exif data in the JPG file, values are enconded like below (comma separated).

There are reports on Apple forums of this problem happening with natively GPS-capable cameras, too, with this new version of iPhoto:

https://discussions.apple.com/message/12033594#12033594

We'll certainly look into this problem and share our findings with Apple, but as many others here have already commented on, we store the information in a standards-compliant manner in the EXIF header and other applications or web sites don't have the same difficulty that iPhoto is having in extracting the tags.

Berend

[billmosier]

this is a duplicate of what I posted in the Apple forum


just to be precise,
I am running 
Mac OS X 10.6.8 (10K540)
Aperture v 3.1.3 modification date is 6/23/2011
iPhoto v 9.1.5 modification date is 7/12/2011
Eye-Fi Helper v 3.3.1 (3.3)  modification date is 6/16/2011
and as far as I can tell before 6/16/2011
I was able to pick up the eye-fi server gps information with aperture but starting that day I was no longer able to pick it up with aperture

admittedly it is very easy to get confused in analyzing all this stuff but it appears as if the modification to eye-fi helper I installed on 6/16 changed the data in the file in maybe some subtle way that aperture and iphoto can no longer handle. other applications are ok, though, such as graphicConverter. If I read an image into graphicConverter and write it out again the gps information still will not be recognized by aperture.

[jsun]

I think Eye-Fi Helper 3.3.1 was out for a couple months (and Eye-Fi geotags were fine in Apple's apps) before this issue started. I've tried uploading to Helper 3.1.9 and see the same results.

With the same app version (Preview.app 5.0.1) on 2 different Macs, I've also observed the same behavior: the location data displays on 10.6.7 but not 10.6.8.

My guess is that it started with Apple's 10.6.8 release in June. Maybe they modified some system-wide library file(s) used by all their photo applications. We'll have to see what the software engineers (and/or Apple) come up with.


To chris.mathrusse: Eye-Fi can only geotag photos during the wireless upload process, so the original photos on the card will not be tagged (unless your camera has GPS). Once you upload photos wirelessly via Eye-Fi, if they do not show geotagging information in Eye-Fi Center, then you are experiencing a different issue than the one in this thread. Check here for some tips if your photos aren't geotagged at all:
http://support.eye.fi/support-resources ... -location/

[prabha]

Thank you everyone for reporting this issue and sharing your findings.

Finally i spent some time today on this and found what is tripping the latest apps such as Mac Preview, iPhoto and may be Aperture and not displaying the geo information. As some one pointed out Apple made some change in their EXIF parser starting from 10.6.8 or so to ignore the value if the EXIF GPSLatitude & GPSLongitude value doesn't contain a denominator for the second component of the degree value.

The GPS coordinates are expressed in terms of degrees, minutes and seconds in the EXIF data. And each of these components are further expressed in terms of numerator and denominator to get a more accurate value. So if the second value is 32.28, it can be expressed as 807/25 which is more accurate. But it can also be expressed as 32/1, which is not very accurate, you loose the value after the decimal point, but a valid mathematical expression. But the latest Apple products didn't like the 32/1 form and requires a denominator other than 1.

So i have made this change in the helper and able to verify successfully on 10.7 and the latest iPhoto 9.1.5. My other system running 10.5 and iPhoto 8.x works fine without this change. So expect a release on the 3.4.x beta version in a day or two after a bunch of tests on other Mac variations to make sure nothing is broken after this and run some tests on the Windows variants too.

On my Windows 7 system, i can see the values are more fine-grained now to the sub second levels with this change, and is definitely an added bonus on both platforms.

-prabha

[billmosier]

that's great news!

[Nick]

Indeet! In the meantime, is there any way to convert the Geotaggs from one to another?

[rpavich]

You've got to be kidding! I bought this damn memory card specifically for the geo tagging capability and now I find it doesn't work! What a rip off! Why the F*** do they promote this friggin thing if it does work? I've tried all the suggestions listed on this thread but there is no geo information associate to the photo; on the memory card, on my file system or on Picasa!

I WANT MY MONEY BACK!!!!!!!!

Well then get your Mom to call Eye Fi and get it back....

[prabha]

iPhoto & Aperture related issues are fixed in 3.4.12 and download it from http://support.eye.fi/agent/download/3.4.12/Eye-Fi.dmg

Let me know if you still have the issue.

[neilberg]

Just downloaded and ran the update, took a couple of pictures and they are tagged in Eye-Fi Center. When they are imported into iPhoto the tagging is not brought with the image or if it is it's not being recognized by iPhoto. I have the latest release of Lion and iPhoto. Update.....I decided to restart the Mac and tried again, all is well! I was just going to edit the post and then thought perhaps better to mention that a restart was necessary for it to work. Cheers

[steevans]

iPhoto & Aperture related issues are fixed in 3.4.12 and download it from http://support.eye.fi/agent/download/3.4.12/Eye-Fi.dmg

Let me know if you still have the issue.

I have also experienced this issue. Thankfully version 3.4.12 of Eye-Fi Helper corrected the problem for newly transferred pictures. Unfortunately previously transferred pictures' geo-tags are unreadable in iPhoto. Is there a method to correct the Geo-Tags of photos that were transferred prior to version 3.4.12 that are unreadable to iPhoto?

Thanks,
Stefan

[spammerhamster]

iPhoto & Aperture related issues are fixed in 3.4.12 and download it from http://support.eye.fi/agent/download/3.4.12/Eye-Fi.dmg

Let me know if you still have the issue.

I have also experienced this issue. Thankfully version 3.4.12 of Eye-Fi Helper corrected the problem for newly transferred pictures. Unfortunately previously transferred pictures' geo-tags are unreadable in iPhoto. Is there a method to correct the Geo-Tags of photos that were transferred prior to version 3.4.12 that are unreadable to iPhoto?

Thanks,
Stefan

I'd like a tool too to retag/correct the geotags. Can the pics be resent to the server or something?

[Nick]

Ok the Version 3.4.12 seems to work for new pictures. But what's about the old pictures? Is there any way to retag them or convert the tags in the new format?

luckly the photos are still on my cam, so i still could (completely) uninstall eye-fi helper with an uninstaller-tool like AppCleaner an sync (and tag) them new. But seriously over 800 photos would last for days...

[MikeV]

luckly the photos are still on my cam, so i still could (completely) uninstall eye-fi helper with an uninstaller-tool like AppCleaner an sync (and tag) them new. But seriously over 800 photos would last for days...

Don't do that... otherwise there will be no geotagging info at all. The geotag info for the pictures is removed from the card once they have been transferred to the PC. There's no way to re-geotag them from the card once they've been transferred. So keep the files on the computer... that way they at least have the location info in them, even if it doesn't work with Apple's products right now.

ALSO... the transfer of the photos is handled by the card, not the desktop software. So the card knows that it has already transferred those pictures, and thus won't transfer them again, even if you completely remove the software from your computer and reinstall it.

[Jacosol]

The geotag info for the pictures is removed from the card once they have been transferred to the PC.

I had no idea about this! Thanks, this will save my nerves...

Jacob