I’m making the transition to a much more stable, usable, and tool-rich photo management tool, iView Media Pro 3. I got tired of dealing with the incredibly slow interface to iPhoto thanks to Apple’s incapable handling & testing of EXIF metadata in storing to their library.

But I digress.

Behold, there was scripting

… and it was good.

I had written an Applescript to set the latitude & longitude (and other location info) to selected photos in iPhoto. iPhoto was often beligerent and required a restart of the iPhoto (and possible database recreation) to read the location information (which was viewable in the “info” panel).

iView puts the location info as a user-editable set of fields in the EXIF data fields. Users can set city, region, country, etc. But for whatever reason, they are unable to change the latitude & longitude.

I paired down my iPhoto script to just handle latitude & longitude and handle getting the file name from iView. The tough part was how to get from the iView example selected_images to a useful POSIX path to feed to exiftool. This code does the trick.

set selectedID to selected_images(1)
if selectedID = {} then
	display dialog "No photos selected"
	return
end if

repeat with this_photo in selectedID
	set photo_path to path of this_photo
	set the image_file to the POSIX path of photo_path

Installing & Using the script

Download the script here and expand it in your ~/Library/Application Support/iView/Plug-ins/Scripts folder and then reload iView. You will also need exiftool, as it is the real magic behind the smoke & mirrors.

To use the script, select whatever photos you want to apply the same location information to. Then go to the “Scripts” icon in the menu bar, and choose the “Set Lat/Lon” script. Enter the latitude, longitude, and altitude in decimal format, pressing “OK” after each field. Wait a little while, and then a dialog will tell you how many photos were processed.

Back in iView, you should see the latitude & longitude information in the right side-bar. You can also turn on lat/lon view in the thumbnail view by pressing Command-J and selecting “Latitude” “Longitude” “Altitude”. You may need to press Command-B to rebuild the thumbnail to have the info show up the first time (or on updates).

When exporting images (say to flickr!), your geo-annotated data will stay intact and can then be mapped (or mapped).