I've been looking into geotagging my photos and finally got around to purchasing a GPS logger. Initially, I just wanted a script to automate the merging of the latitude and longitude from the GPS log into each image's EXIF information, after which, I'd just import the images into Aperture as normal. But then I found out that even more useful would be to reverse geocode the images. This would mean the the IPTC fields for city, state and country would be automatically populated, saving me from the task of manually entering each in Aperture.
Well, HoudahGeo does it better and more elegantly than any other software out there. After downloading a demo and reading Brett Gross' write-up on Aperture and houdahGeo I was sold.
The one glitch is that HoudahGeo saves both the city and the state into the IPTC city field, separated by a comma and a space, e.g., Great River, New York. I sent an email to the developers and was told that the next version, 1.5, would have this fix. Until then, I've whipped up an Automator workflow with a bit of bash scripting that calls exiftool that splits the IPTC metadata properly and will work with cities and states with any characters, including spaces, but not commas. Here's the guts to the Split IPTC City And State Automator Script:
# This automator workflow is licensed under the GPL, v2
for f in "$@"
do
CITYSTATE=`exiftool -City -s -s -s $f`
CITY=${CITYSTATE%,*}
STATE=${CITYSTATE#*, }
exiftool -overwrite_original -City="$CITY" -Province-State="$STATE" $f
done
So my workflow is now:
- Copy photos from memory card to temporary directory on my harddrive along with GPS log
- Use HoudahGeo to tag each image with longitude, latitude and altitude, along with the city/state and country
- Save the GPS log away in case I need it later
- Run the Automator script on the images to fix the city/state issue (installing it as a Finder plugin is recommended)
- Import the images into Aperture
As you've probably noticed by now, Apple's Aperture 2 trial does not convert your Aperture 1.5 library. They do this because it is a one way conversion and if you opt not to buy the upgrade, you cannot switch back or otherwise use your current Aperture 1.5 to open the library. But what good is a demo without photos to use with it? Well, you could just import a handful oh photos you've got, but one of the biggest reasons to upgrade is Aperture 2 is supposed to be worlds faster. The only way to really see this is to load your entire library in Aperture 2 and give it a whirl.
First, close Aperture 1.5, rename it so something like Old Aperture, download the Aperture 2 demo, and install it. Navigate in Finder to your library and view the package contents (don't double click it, that will just try to open it in Aperture). See all those projects in there? Move them out of there, someplace else, temporarily. Now open Aperture 2; it will probably tell you it can't convert your library and ask if you want to create a trial library. Agree and name your new library. Next, go to File, Import then Projects. Select all those projects in that temporary holding place. This will take a while. No, really.
The bad news is, this won't work if you've got a 100 GB library and only 50 GB of free space. You can always buy Aperture 2 and then it will convert it for you, and rather quickly at that. The good news is, you can move those projects back into the old Aperture 1.5 library package and there's all your stuff, just as it was before this entire Aperture 2 brouhaha.
Don't forget that this doesn't change you from RAW decoder 1.1 to RAW decoder 2.0. There's a pretty nifty way to migrate your images selectively to RAW 2.0 to handle that. You get the (supposedly) better image quality and lens metadata as well.
Aperture 2 can extract metadata about the lens model you used from your image’s EXIF, if your camera writes it. A few little points I discovered about this:
Firstly, the field is not shown by default in the Metadata panel. You have to go to the Metadata tab, disclose the EXIF panel at the bottom and then select the checkbox beside the Lens Model field.
Sweet. I loves me some metadata. Now to make it play nice with my website. You see, mere focal length isn't enough.
_at_hope.square thumbnail.jpg "Adam Savage Talks About His Dodo (And His OCD) At HOPE")
