Geotagging outdoors with the original iPhone—which uses triangulation of cell tower signals—seems to be as entertaining as some of the "productivity tools" in the App Store. In other words, laughably useless. While the iPhone did somewhat erroneously relocate a pavement sign to the North Sea shipping lanes, it also managed to pin a photo of a rose to within 1.4km of the actual location. How can it be so inconsistent, and are things really as bad as they seem?
The new iPhone 3G features built-in GPS, which although limited at present offers the prospect of enjoying a growing number of location-aware applications. One of these is geotagging using iPhone's built-in camera, and the good news is that those with first generation iPhones can update to version 2.0 firmware and experience similar functionality. Similar, not the same—because the original iPhone contains no GPS receiver hardware, and for reasons unknown Apple's Bluetooth implementation is currently neutered so iPhone cannot be paired to a data logger.
The image below was recorded in Chesterfield, pretty much in the middle of the UK. To plot the iPhone-geotagged location you'll need to download the images using iPhoto; it's no use e-mailing them from the phone, because the EXIF-GPS data are stripped out. Something for Apple to fix!
iPhone now includes "location awareness" for candid photography
Aside: The "pick up or pay up" pavement graffiti is put down by the local council, using biodegradable spray paint. Despite such signs it's still a case of "eyes down" in our neighbourhood, as most dog fouling is left on the sidewalks and footpaths where it was deposited. Grrr...
If you drag this particular image to your desktop (the EXIF data are intact) and open it in Preview, when you choose Inspector > More info > GPS > Locate, a Google Map will open and locate the photo... in the North Sea shipping lanes:
iPhone thinks this pavement sign is in the North Sea
Notice the "(null)" after the latitude and longitude in the info window? I don't know why it's there, but its presence appears significant. I had read that east and west were transposed, pending a bug fix—but that doesn't seem too likely an explanation for laughable geocoding given that it can be semi-accurate in some cases and totally hopeless in others.
Then I noticed something very odd: the location of the photo changed when I uploaded it to Flickr! Once your image is in iPhoto you can use a plugin like FFXporter to upload to Flickr. This won't strip the coordinates EXIF-GPS, but some Flickr uploaders and other photo manipulation software will do just that, so be careful what you choose to use.
Here is the same image on Flickr; on the map it has now moved inland approx. 190km and is placed at "only" 800m from the actual location! So what's different?
The first image (shown above) was downloaded from iPhone into iPhoto, dragged to the desktop, plotted using Preview, then edited in Photoshop—with the erroneous coordinates preserved.
The second image (as uploaded to Flickr) was downloaded from iPhone into iPhoto, rotated 90 degrees counter-clockwise and "enhanced" using iPhoto's editing tools, then uploaded from iPhoto using FFXporter. When I opened the image I sent to Flickr in Preview, I noticed the coordinates had changed to specify North and West purely as a result of editing in iPhoto prior to publishing:
No more "null" coordinates after manipulation in iPhoto
I don't think the geotagging issues I experienced are to do with laughable triangulation on the iPhone at all; I think the problem lies with iPhoto.
Update 23.07.08: iPhoto 7.1.4 appears to have corrected this issue, which occurred when you dragged a photo out of iPhoto and on to the desktop. I took some photos in the garden, imported them into iPhoto 7.1.3 without deleting the originals from iPhone: they were located in the North Sea. I then applied the 7.1.4 update, re-imported the same photos, and they are now located in my neighbourhood.
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Besides of thinking of the iPhone 3G as ANOTHER Apple-product for which the consumers are doing the Q&A, I've seen your statement before over the last couple of days e.g. here.
I also hate to see there's no EXIF-data included at all when sending "photo.jpg" from the iPhone to one of my mail-accounts. Haven't tried it with iPhoto so far: the syncing just takes too long...
I like my (free / won) iPhone so far, but it behaves like an immature on lots of points!
Thanks Henk. Reading that it sounds like there's probably more than one issue creating a confusing picture. On the positive side Apple now has good reason to make iPhoto fully location-aware (plotting, IPTC city/ country headers etc) and perhaps while they are updating they might finally get around to resolving the EXIF "cache on first import only" bug that causes geotagged images not to show in iPhoto under some circumstances.
Oh, and congrats on your iPhone freebie. Perhaps that takes some of the sting out of your having to pay for the previous iTouch firmware update?!
Tis annoying that emailing your iPhone photos to Flickr/Tumblr/MobileMe galleries loses the data.
Interestingly, the iCab Image>Information window does not display the null value after Lat/Long info.
@Bruce: jailbreaking the iPod Touch took care of the firmware-"issues". ;-)
Wanna buy one by the way?
Another example, after trying this myself:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/b-o-k/2689069017/
Never been to Ireland before, now I seem to live there... :-P
Well Henk, I'd need more than a few pints of Guinness to think that blue sky was photographed in Ireland. Something like this I would believe ;-)
There still seems to be an issue with iPhoto 7.1.4, or maybe that is in the iPhone 1G.
Pictures taken in DK are -12.nn W, ie. west of england. Should be +12.nn E there.. ! The 55.n n N seems to be OK though.
Mine is the original iPhone too Jacob. Perhaps this hint re using Maps to get a fix for your current location by triangulation before using location-aware program is still applicable?
My problems when using Preview started AFTER upgrading to 7.1.4.
In 7.1.3 I didn't and still don't have that problem. Strange.
Now I only have to figure out how to downgrade iPhoto on my main computer.
Time Machine?