Comments on: How to use your image geotags in Flickr

By: vlad

vlad — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 06:13:52 +0000

John…thanx for your comment. Well…unless I have added the specific keywords Flickr was looking for, I couldn’t get my geotags to show up. Granted, I haven’t used geotags in flickr in a few months so my conclusion might be a little outdated.

By: John Doe

John Doe — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 14:47:31 +0000

Geotagging support on Flickr is frustrating today and it’s on and off randomly on its own will. Say I upload 10 geotagged pictures taken at the same place by the same camera, only 3 of them ended up on the Flickr map.

By: vlad

vlad — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 06:37:08 +0000

Lantrix…thanx very much for your note. From what I know about Flickr, they actually don’t read the EXIF directly but rather take the EXIF geotags and transform them in IPTC keywords. Last time I checked images just with EXIF geotags didn’t work directly unless you manipulate them as I have indicated. Maybe they have changed like you said…I’ll check it out.
I would be willing to bet that if you download your images from Flickr they will also have tags in the IPTC keyword portion of your image’s metadata. I would love if you could add a comment with what you find. I’ll give it a try myself as well.

By: Lantrix

Lantrix — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 06:04:16 +0000

They MUST have changed this recently. If I take a photo with my iPhone, it auto embeds lat/long into the EXIF data, as seen by exiftool:

lantrix@lexx:~/Desktop $ exiftool IMG_0625.jpg |grep GPS
GPS Latitude Ref : South
GPS Longitude Ref : East
GPS Time Stamp : 17:39:54.86
GPS Latitude : 38 deg x’ xx.xx” S
GPS Longitude : 145 deg xx’ xx.xx” E
GPS Position : 38 deg x’ xx.xx” S, 145 deg xx’ xx.xx” E

And when I upload this picture to Flickr, it shows as “mapped” already with the same lat/long when I edit the picture in the Organizer:

Latitude: -38.xxxx Longtitude: 145.xxxx

By: vlad

vlad — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 17:30:39 +0000

Thanx for you comment…and agreement . The reason is probably because Flickr is an old application and geotagging was not as popular then, but tagging was and they focused their application to support tags…So, when geotagging became the next cool thing they just turned geotags…into tags. That’s my guess.

Anyway…happy scripting

By: wprasek

wprasek — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 10:23:11 +0000

I agree this is incredibly frustrating. I have thousands of carefully geotagged images and now it appears I have to resort to this time-consuming kludge workaround because Flickr is dragging its feet on implementing basic industry standards.

*sigh*

time to whip up an applescript to batch-add those keywords i guess. ugh.